Usable cellular providers for drone flights.

Sinamics

Hi
It would be nice to know which of the operators can be used for drone flight.
Who can deliver a mobile connection with public ip and no port retrictions.

Working
Operator : Telenor Norway
APN : internet.public

Chuckster1

Hi.

Im pretty sure the Verizon cellular data I'm using has port restrictions. I've been getting around this by using 2 laptops (1 at home with LAN) and controlling it remotely with team viewer. My home Internet has 5 mbps upload speed, so it's not too bad. Only restriction is game pad controller doesn't work. Lately, I've been flying from my house anyway, with great sucess! Also looking into setting up VPN to bypass port restrictions.

Ramon_van_der_Heijde

Thanks for this post.
It seems like China Mobile Hong Kong does not allow port forwarding.
neither does smartone HK.

SkyDrone

Ramon_van_der_Heijde

We use Smartone as our main carrier here in Hong Kong (as they have cheap unlimited-data options).
NAT circumvention via UDP hole-punching works reliable with Smartone. We get a direct peer-to-peer connection in 100% of the cases.

Sinamics

Obviously, this is a quite big problem around the world.
For me, this was never an issue as my operator gives me public IP.

The workaround would be as Chuckster mentioned to use VPN or teamview, the only drawback is latency.
Has anyone asked why they are blocking ports on the cell network? I do not see the point of doing so.

mocart

Sinamics is there any app or script that can check automaticly if my provider pass all requirmets or should do check it step by step ?

Ramon_van_der_Heijde

What confuses me is that I am able to send signals over port 14550 UDP to my 4g drone when my GCS is connected to my home network. It does seem strange, if the port is blocked, should I not be able to do that?
(If that makes sense)

Sinamics

What confuses me is that I am able to send signals over port 14550 UDP to my 4g drone when my GCS is connected to my home network. It does seem strange, if the port is blocked, should I not be able to do that?
(If that makes sense)

Correct.
You would not be able to communicate with your 4G drone if your operator had port restrictions.
Your problem seems to be a matter of GCS configuration.

Chuckster1

Well, I've found yet another solution, but it will cost an additional $20 a month on my Verizon cell phone plan. Not sure if I'm going to do it or not. I already have one wifi hot spot in my plane (Verizon mifi jetpack). I can get another one for my ground station. The jetpack allows port forwarding, unlike my tethered internet connection from my phone. Or, I could just send my Galaxy S5 in my plane(with tethered internet), and use my current hot spot for my ground control station...NOT!!! lololol

Ramon_van_der_Heijde

I got a little wiser. My friend is a systems analyst. We checked the line of communication back and forth. It seems like my ISP does not allow incoming connection requests. For instance, APM telemetry connection is initiated at port 14550. After the connection has been established, a tunnel is created, over which return data packets are sent. The port for return packets is actually different from 14550.
I have opened the relevant ports. Turned off the firewall inside the dongle. Even turned on DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), but to no avail.
My home ISP will accept the incoming request on port 14550, but my mobile ISP will not.
It seems like my mobile ISP is blocking the port, even though I can control the drone over 4g.
The next step is to see if we can initiate a tunnel on a port that isn't blocked, and reroute the return connection over this port.
We know how to do this for TCP connections, but UDP may be tricky.
Do we know if video over TCP is much slower than over UDP?
I will keep you informed.
WW

Sinamics

Well, I've found yet another solution, but it will cost an additional $20 a month on my Verizon cell phone plan. Not sure if I'm going to do it or not. I already have one wifi hot spot in my plane (Verizon mifi jetpack). I can get another one for my ground station. The jetpack allows port forwarding, unlike my tethered internet connection from my phone. Or, I could just send my Galaxy S5 in my plane(with tethered internet), and use my current hot spot for my ground control station...NOT!!! lololol

Hehe. I bet Samsung would be your next Sponsor then.. 🙂 With nice "Samsung"poster on the side.

I got a little wiser. My friend is a systems analyst. We checked the line of communication back and forth. It seems like my ISP does not allow incoming connection requests. For instance, APM telemetry connection is initiated at port 14550. After the connection has been established, a tunnel is created, over which return data packets are sent. The port for return packets is actually different from 14550.
I have opened the relevant ports. Turned off the firewall inside the dongle. Even turned on DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), but to no avail.
My home ISP will accept the incoming request on port 14550, but my mobile ISP will not.
It seems like my mobile ISP is blocking the port, even though I can control the drone over 4g.
The next step is to see if we can initiate a tunnel on a port that isn't blocked, and reroute the return connection over this port.
We know how to do this for TCP connections, but UDP may be tricky.
Do we know if video over TCP is much slower than over UDP?
I will keep you informed.
WW

I personally dont think you will notice any diffrence using TCP, "in most cases".
I always use udp so i dont know for sure.
It would be nice if you report back with the performance using tcp, as many other "included myself"are asking the same question.

Sinamics

Reported Works
Operator : Vodafone Italy
APN : M2Mbis.vodafone.it

Kekko991

Sinamics

Do You live in Italy? I'm italian too and i have following operator: WIND and 3 ITA .

If You Can help me with my project Will be' great

Tommy_Larsen

This is not really a problem anymore if you use a Raspberry Pi or similar. I have some C code to break through NAT and most firewalls that i'm testing now. Will report back soon.

Sinamics

Hi Tommy. Happy new year.. 🙂
Hmm.... Could you explain? Are you talking about VPN tunnel or 3rd party server? Seems to good to be true if just a script could break trough any firewall settings applied by cell operator.

Artem_Bulashev

Sinamics I will tell you my tcp low latency secret... don't share it too much...

I feel bad knowing and not letting people know.

https://www.remot3.it/web/

It is tcp based tunneling web profile. It I will host and proxy your connection, which lifts ALL restrictions...

Instal on Pi, open wanted TCP ports to Remot3.
Form your ground station you open the website and press connect on wanted "port", let say ssh or video feed or RC control port
Remot3 will take date from Pi tunnel and generated proxy for connection address and port for you.
Copy past them into your ground station and you there you have.

It is not a web based server, it is like a web router, it provides you a link to directly connect to Pi created tunnel. Something like reverse tunneling with web based GUI and installer.

It take no time to set up, so you should try it.
Works extremely well for real time control of the drone over 4g

Video feed is still under examination

Heiko_S

Germany

Working
Operator : Telekom
APN : internet.t-d1.de

Tricky exception:
You can not connect to another Telekom "private" cell stick. Telekom is blocking that kind of stuff internally so they can sell their business tariff. Right now I'm using Telekom at my drone, so I can connect to my drone from every ISP except Telekom private cell tariff. But I can not stream UDP since I don't have found a second working provider (because UDP can't be grabbed from outside, is has to be sent, right?
please correct me if I'm wrong, would love to use UDP). TCP is working, since I can use a (gstreamer)tcpserversink locally at the drone and connect from outside via tcpclientsrc host=xyz.

Sinamics

Thx for sharing.
Seems strange if they block connections internally. Could you explain a little further how you have configured everything?
Are you using cell dongle in both GCS and Aircraft?

You could easily check if your operator gives you public ip. Read this post https://discuss.uavmatrix.com/Blog/38/4#cmt20969

UDP is more like a constant stream of data sent from the aircraft towards your GCS on a specifyed port and IP, and it does`t care if some packages are not received. On TCP, every packages sent from the aircraft will respond back with "delivered"or "not delivered", and if neccessary send the previouse package again.

So when using UDP, you only need to specify which port you want to listen to for any new packages at your GCS. If you are behind NAT you need to forward that particular port to your GCS ip in your firewall.

Heiko_S

Gstreamer/Pi with PiCam / NoIP Client and Telekom Stick on Drone:

Server:

raspivid -t 0 --nopreview -w 480 -h 320 -fps 5 -vf -hf -b 200000 -o - | gst-launch-1.0 -v fdsrc ! h264parse ! rtph264pay config-interval=1 pt=96 ! gdppay ! tcpserversink host=0.0.0.0 port=303

Gotta use sudo to bind it to 0.0.0.0
If the cell bandwidth is not large enough, the stream will start to have delay. I guess that's because what Bernt wrote in the last post about TCP/UDP. So I have pretty low bandwith settings till I get UDP working.

Client:

gst-launch-1.0 -v tcpclientsrc host=DYNDNSHOSTHERE port=303 ! gdpdepay ! rtph264depay ! avdec_h264 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false

Not sure what that "sync" does, was hoping to remove the delay in case of low bandwidth but couldn't test with that specific circumstance for now.
Remember - if your client is at the same APN (internet.t-d1.de ) it cannot connect.

Sinamics

Sync=false means that it ignores the timestamp and displays the video as soon as the frame arrives.

Sinamics

mocart
You can run this Sinamics software to check if your port is open. Keep in mind that you only need to open those ports in your GCS router / modem.

Sinamics

Welcome Kekko991

Im from the cold living Norway.. ⛄
If you refer to post Kekko991 then we need some more information on your goal. There are many skilled persons with broad experience building multicopters or planes in this forum.