Riga Hosts Demo of World's First Shore-to-Ship-to-Drone 5G Network

Latvian telecom company LMT has carried out what it believes to be the first full-scale demonstration of a 5G maritime data network with ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore and ship-to-drone connections. 

The demo was carried out last Thursday at the port of Riga, in association with icebreaker operator and marine services firm LVR Fleet. The "multi-hop" distributed network connected an LVR pilot boat, the Dore, with an LVR icebreaker, the Varma. Meanwhile, an unmanned surface vessel connected to the same network to provide a remote video feed, transmitted to an aerial drone with a 5G transceiver. Port executives from Lübeck, Kiel, and Hamburg were on hand to observe the tests. 

An earlier test trialed the network's ability to reach far from shore, and it demonstrated a stable 5G connection at a distance of nearly 30 nautical miles from the shoreside base station. This kind of range opens up new possibilities for data-intensive applications in the near-coastal environment - like controlling unmanned surface vessels and aerial drones - at a more economical price point than satcom connectivity. 

"The deployment of maritime 5G networks and solutions has the potential to enable fast data transmission in circumstances where vast amounts of data need to be transmitted from ship to ship or from ship to port," said Juris Binde, LMT's president. "It’s our immense honor to be the first to present this innovative technology and witness interest from potential export partners already."