🛰️Ericsson's ISAC Turns Cell Towers Into Drone Radar Starting 2027

Your cell towers are about to become drone radar

Ericsson just made your cell network a drone radar. Its ISAC technology uses radio reflections to spot and track low-altitude objects, and it works on infrastructure that's already standing. The company starts commercial pilots with select customers in 2027 and goes broader in 2028. Why should you care? Because the sensing happens in the same towers carrying your traffic. Mobile antennas already cover the low elevations near ground level where drones usually fly, so the hardware is already in the right place. If you build security, command and control, or critical comms systems, ISAC data can flow to authorized external systems through standardized interfaces. That's the part that makes it useful beyond a demo. The tests are real. AT&T ran ISAC in Arlington, Texas, and Erillisverkot, Finland's state-owned critical communications company, ran it too. Both trials detected multiple drones and tracked their movements. The catch: this needs sensing-capable radios, dedicated compute, and Massive MIMO antennas that meet specific spectrum requirements. Today's 5G can do some of this, but 6G's standards-based interoperability between vendors' base stations should sharpen precision.