The Optus outage has spotlighted weaknesses within the telecom business, including the illumination of how vital it is to have constant and reliable telecommunications access to ensure drone delivery safety for a successful rollout.

Israeli-headquartered drone communications Elsight, warned future outages could cause safety issues, which is particularly challenging for last and middle mile logistics businesses looking at launching delivery drones with autonomous flights to boost profitability.

According to Amazon, the e-commerce giant intends to deliver 500 million parcels a year by drone by 2030, which would see the company expand its deliveries to the UK and Italy next year.

Drones delivered 875,000 packages globally last year, compared to 507,000 in 2021, with that number estimated to go up to 1.04 million by early next year, according to McKinsey & Company.

Before Amazon hits its ambitious target and drone delivery is fully rolled out, Elsight chief executive Yoav Amitai said regulators must have “complete confidence” in the safety of the flights.

“The Optus outage … was a prime example of the importance of safety and security in the drone delivery space,” Amitai said.

“This is important for drone operation over built-up areas like drone delivery services. The operators need complete confidence in their connection to be able to operate over urban areas.”

According to an Elsight and P3 Tech survey, the greatest obstacle to the industry’s expansion was regulators, with around 75% of survey takers citing regulatory issues as a barrier to the widespread application of cutting-edge operations like beyond the visual line of sight operations and flights over the public.

These findings go directly against the sentiments of David Carbon, a Australian-born executive in charge of Amazon’s drone program, who had said the eCommerce giant had attained a level of safety that was “magnitudes higher than driving to the store”.

“That’s not just us plucking a 10-12 point word out of Scrabble right? It is actually mathematically hundreds of times safer,” Carbon said.

There has been some headway in regulators being more open-minded, however, starting in southeast Queensland operations where Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) had granted DoorDash and Alphabet-owned Wing authorisation for a pilot program for drone deliveries with that program expanding to Ipswich.

Additionally, CASA permitted Swoop Aero in 2021 to begin regional drone deliveries of pharmaceuticals in the Goondiwindi region on the Queensland-NSW border.

According to Amitai, despite some improvements, Australia faces a major barrier in the rapid adoption of drones.

“From a company standpoint, they are looking for population density that makes sure that they can deploy those systems. Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and the Gold Coast and other places obviously make sense but the rest of Australia it will be very hard to show economical proof of that because of the density of the population.

“That’s why companies are starting in other places. Like in the US, for example, every city has a required population and there is basically an unlimited number of cities like that. It’s not about CASA, they’re doing a reasonable job compared with other regulators.”