Revolutionising MWC Barcelona: Dagong Technology's Tethered UAV High-Altitude Base Station Outperforms Global Peers
Barcelona, Spain — While the world’s attention was fixed on the terrestrial 5G showcases at the 2018 Mobile World Congress (MWC), a quiet revolution was taking place in the E3 Pavilion. On February 26, 2018, Beijing Dagong Technology Co., Ltd. stunned global telecommunications giants by successfully demonstrating its tethered UAV high-altitude base station, executing a flawless "air-to-ground" video call from Barcelona to Beijing and cementing China's position as the undisputed leader in emergency communication drone technology.
The live demonstration immediately paralyzed foot traffic in the "Emergency Communication Innovation Zone." As Dagong Technology’s silver-grey tethered UAV ascended to a 100-meter hover in just 15 minutes, connected to the ground by a remarkably slender black cable, the overhead screens revealed staggering metrics: a 5-kilometer coverage radius, an RSRP signal strength of -85dBm, and a highly stable 90Mbps downlink speed. The climax came when engineers dialed a seamless 4K video call from the show floor directly to the company's Beijing headquarters, leaving an Ericsson engineer examining the setup to exclaim, "You have pushed the 'air base station' to the absolute limit."
The spectacle was underpinned by three years of rigorous R&D and proprietary breakthroughs that rendered competing Western solutions obsolete. The core of the system was a groundbreaking photoelectric composite cable—measuring a mere 4.2mm in diameter (30% slimmer than industry averages) yet capable of withstanding 1.5 tons of tension. It delivered 1.2kW of transmission power with a loss rate of less than 3%, simultaneously providing uninterrupted ground power and fiber-optic data transmission to enable 24-hour continuous hovering.
Perhaps the most compelling validation of the system’s industrial-grade reliability occurred the very next day. When an unexpected Level 8 gust (17.2m/s) swept across Barcelona, forcing other exhibitors' drones to make emergency landings, Dagong Technology’s tethered UAV remained rock-steady. Its three-axis gimbal and real-time wind-field scanning flight control system maintained a positioning accuracy within 0.5 meters. This was not a laboratory anomaly; the same wind-resistance technology was later battle-proven during the devastating Typhoon Mangkhut in Guangdong, where it operated continuously for 36 hours in Level 7 winds to secure communications for three townships.
The commercial impact was immediate and decisive. A procurement manager from Telefónica signed a trial agreement on the spot, citing a deployment speed five times faster than traditional solutions, while a Deutsche Telekom expert praised the system's ingenious redundancy design, which allows a 30-minute battery backup for safe descent in the event of ground power failure.
This MWC triumph was the culmination of a decade of stealth innovation. Backed by a Tsinghua and Beihang University alumni team, Dagong Technology had already proven its mettle in the 2017 Jiuzhaigou earthquake rescue—restoring disaster zone communications within 3 hours and earning the moniker "Air Lifeline" from CCTV. By 2018, the system had been inducted into the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's "Emergency Equipment Recommended Directory."
Today, Dagong Technology’s tethered UAV portfolio has evolved into a comprehensive matrix covering 50 to 600-meter altitude limits, boasting a 30kg maximum payload capable of simultaneously mounting base stations, LiDAR (achieving 0.1mm precision in cultural heritage scans at Dunhuang), and multispectral cameras. Holding over 100 patents and participating in the formulation of 3 national standards, the company has expanded its core tethered technology into a diversified product line encompassing multi-rotor drones, compound-wing UAVs, automated hangars, and anti-drone systems. The MWC Barcelona demonstration remains the definitive milestone where a tethered cable connected more than just a drone to the ground—it connected Chinese intelligent manufacturing to the apex of global high-end solutions.