There is a pattern that anyone watching digital infrastructure develop over the past two decades will recognise. A new technology scales faster than the standards bodies can move. National regulators make their own calls. Industry builds around those calls. And by the time anyone tries to knit it together into something globally interoperable, the fragmentation is already baked in.

That is the trajectory the drone industry is currently on, and a growing number of voices from telecoms, aviation and government are arguing that this time, the sector needs to move earlier.

Aviation authorities worldwide are accelerating work on beyond visual line of sight operations, drone first responder programmes and the first wave of passenger-carrying eVTOL aircraft. Each of those use cases depends on drones being electronically visible and identifiable to other airspace users and authorities in real time.

Broadcasting position, altitude, speed and identity to create the kind of situational awareness that makes high-density airspace manageable. Electronic conspicuity, as it is known, is the foundation. And right now, the standards underpinning it vary significantly across markets.

The practical risk is straightforward. A drone that is fully compliant and electronically visible in one jurisdiction may not register properly in the next. For operators running cross-border missions, logistics, infrastructure inspection, and emergency response, that is not an acceptable baseline. For governments trying to build drone programmes into national security and disaster recovery capability, it is a structural vulnerability.

A coalition that includes the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ericsson, Nokia, Viasat and NextNav has published a Joint Requirements Statement making the case that mobile networks should be written into airspace safety architecture now, before national approaches diverge too far to reconcile.

The document, developed through the GSMA Fusion initiative, argues that telecoms infrastructure can do considerably more than provide a data pipe for drone operations. Properly integrated, mobile networks can handle trusted identity and authentication, secure positioning, real-time telemetry assurance, prioritised connectivity for safety-critical operations and auditable data streams, capabilities that collectively amount to a trust layer for autonomous aviation at scale.

Non-terrestrial networks get a specific mention as a resilience layer for missions where terrestrial coverage runs out: remote operations, maritime environments, disaster recovery scenarios and national security deployments where continuity cannot be optional.

Barney Stinton, who leads aviation market development at GSMA Fusion, put the timing concern plainly: “The drone market is scaling far faster than many of today’s airspace and identification frameworks were originally designed for. The objective is not to replace existing aviation systems, but to bring together aviation, government and telecom industries early enough to avoid fragmentation and to help build globally scalable foundations before national approaches diverge too far.”

The coalition plans to continue engagement with regulators, aviation stakeholders and standards bodies throughout 2026.

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