In November 2021, Vi announced a trial with Vizzbee covering UAS traffic management, Aerobridge, video streaming, and real-time analysis over its trial 5G network in Pune. The integration work continued into 2022.

This is a retrospective account. The public announcement establishes the partnership and test scope. The timing of the engineering and approval work below comes from my project notes, not a published certification record.

What the network changed

The aircraft did not depend on the mobile network for attitude control; that loop remained onboard. The network carried telemetry, coordination data, and application traffic such as video.

We got that application path working over a weekend. In our tests, 5G provided more uplink headroom for video and made concurrent application traffic easier to handle. Network slicing was a possible way to isolate operational traffic, but our implementation did not assume that a guaranteed slice would always be available.

Those results were useful, but they answered a narrow question: could the network support the application traffic we wanted to carry?

What it did not change

The broader effort to reach an approved BVLOS operation took us roughly eighteen months. That work included DGCA permissions, NPNT compliance, the proposed flight corridor, coordination with local airspace authorities, operating procedures, and evidence for the deconfliction system.

The eighteen-month figure describes this project, not a general Indian approval timeline. The network trial did not itself establish BVLOS approval, regulatory compliance, or the safety of the complete operation.

The practical sequencing lesson was straightforward: start the regulatory and airspace work alongside the first system design. For this project, integrating the transport was much shorter than establishing the evidence and operating process around it.