Background
Moving essential supplies across the world to those in need is the critical mission of Swoop Aero. For the leaders of Swoop Aero, the best frontier to provide access to emergency and routine medical supplies was by air. Swoop Aero saw drones as the best platform to mitigate common logistics hurdles such as traffic congestion, immense distances, locational accessibility, inhospitable terrain, and data shortages.
Since its founding in 2017, Swoop Aero has achieved a number of global “firsts”. For example, In Vanuatu, Swoop Aero became the first company to complete a drone-based vaccine delivery to the remote island community of Epi. This delivery earned Swoop Aero the title of the world’s first provider of drone-based vaccine delivery service. By 2019, the company had scaled up significantly and was performing 10 long-range medical flights per day in Malawi. These drone flights were successful in cold-chain deliveries of essential health supplies, including oxytocin, anti-rabies and HIV related commodities, both in bringing medication and bringing back collections of blood samples for HIV/AIDs testing.
Another milestone in Swoop Aero’s successes was a multi-purpose medical air logistics and disaster relief operation in the South of Malawi in January of 2020. Swoop Aero’s multipurpose operations strengthened the region’s health supply chain, improving access to essential health supplies for remote and isolated communities as well as future-proofing the region to deal and mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
More recently, Swoop Aero worked alongside platform service partner, Skyports and NHS Scotland, in Scotland to facilitate the rapid collection, transportation and distribution of COVID-19 samples, tests and vaccinations across the Isles and Highlands in the far North of Scotland. A trip that would normally require ferry transport and take two days was reduced drastically to just a 30-minute drone flight.
Challenge
Swoop Aero needed a way to provide global connectivity for these flights taking place in remote locations with, in many cases, limited access to connectivity. Swoop Aero needed resilient connectivity, but they also needed future-proof, no-restrictions connectivity that could work no matter where the drones would fly.
Swoop Aero can be piloted from anywhere in the world using existing telecommunications infrastructure, including satellite, CAT-M, 5G, 4G, and 3G connections. Communications between the aircraft and Swoop Aero’s remote operations centre are achieved via a mobile cellular connection with backup satellite communication powered by the iridium cloud. The use of pre-allocated communications frequencies alleviates the need for potentially lengthy allocation approvals through ACMA, enabling immediate service deployment upon aviation regulator approval.
Solution
To create a connectivity solution that was fail-safe, and guarded against global roaming restrictions, Swoop Aero came to KORE. With multi-modal, international connectivity solutions, including eSIM, KORE was able to provide a connectivity strategy that could keep the drones in flight no matter where in the world or how remote the destination. KORE created a nimble and holistic connectivity strategy through satellite connectivity with cellular redundancy, enabled via eSIM technology with over-the-air provisioning. Equipping a piece of equipment – in this case, a drone – with multi-modal, multi-carrier technology through a single SIM allows drone flights to seamlessly switch between connectivity technologies to stay in the air.
“The ability to communicate reliably anywhere in the world, anytime, allows Swoop Aero to deploy a sustainable and scalable drone logistics network bridging the last-mile and enabling an equitable health access to anyone from Scotland to Malawi,” Swoop Aero CEO Eric Peck said.
Results
Swoop Aero can trust their connectivity to power mission-critical flights with everywhere coverage and redundancy for the greatest resilience and reliability. With the KORE eSIM, they can effectively scale anywhere across the globe knowing that their drones can be remotely provisioned at the production facility and delivered with out-of-the-box connectivity.
The KORE eSIM also protects against future network shutdowns, especially places in the world that still heavily utilize 2G and 3G networks, which are projected to be phased out within the next decade.
Additionally, Swoop Aero can spend more time focusing on healthcare delivery and less on connectivity management through KORE. Managing multiple carriers across an international landscape can be time consuming and overall can impact cost and performance. KORE provides multi-carrier and multi-technology connectivity under one contract, and one billing and support system to streamline solutions.
About Swoop Aero
Swoop Aero is an Australian drone-powered logistics company, founded to transform the way the world moves essential supplies. Swoop Aero is an impact-driven organisation bringing healthcare logistics into the 21st century by deploying bi-directional drone networks. The company is trusted to create value by sustainably transforming health supply chains to improve health outcomes in every community and country in which they operate. Since its founding in 2017, Swoop Aero has worked with some of the largest organisations in global health across three continents, including UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, UKAID, USAID and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Swoop Aero’s forward-thinking approach to health and successful operations in three continents have led them to be recognised globally as one of the leading players in the med-tech industry.
Learn more at swoop.aero
