I flew a drone that was 1,400 miles away and it didn't go so well - CNET

"I can see more and more of those use cases with drones," said Chris Penrose, who heads up coected devices at AT&T. His company and Intel said at the show that they were working on getting 4G LTE into drones.

Bumpy ride

The drone demonstration was all about showing off the haptic feedback capabilities of the custom controller, which looked like a miniature, flexible construction crane. You gripped one end and manipulated it to steer the quadcopter.

The haptic feedback is similar in principle to the vibration you feel when tapping your iPhone's 3D Touch, but far more forceful.

If the quadcopter, which was small enough to fit in your hand, flies close to a predetermined virtual border, the controller will actually resist your motion to continue moving in that direction. Ericsson technicians had set up a glowing, see-through cube in Stockholm. The point of the demo was for you to fly above the cube and enter from the top. Flying toward the sides would only trigger the virtual wall, causing the controller to push back.

I never actually made it into the cube because it was difficult to assess the depth of the space. It didn't help that feedback came a little slow.

That's a limitation of 4G, which lacks real-time responsiveness. With 5G, the delay between when you send a signal and when you get a response, known as latency, drops significantly. Industry executives often give the example of a surgeon in one city performing an operation with robotic hands in another location, with 5G powering a real-time response.

To prove this point, Ericsson had quadcopters coected to a "simulated" 5G network, which is limited and only designed to show off its lower latency. The drones, which were inches in front of me, responded perfectly as they flew near a miniature wind turbine. As I got closer to the turbine, the haptic feedback kicked in, preventing me from going further.

Brave new world?

While drones are hot ticket items for consumers, a lot of questions remain about where they should be flown and how they should be used. On one hand, extending the range of these aerial vehicles can greatly help businesses with equipment maintenance or security monitoring. But camera-equipped drones that can be operated from anywhere open the door for potential abuse and the violation of personal privacy.

No one has figured out just the right balance, not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which is still working out the rules for long-distance travel.

But the technology is coming. AT&T said that it's working with Intel now in the hope that more regulatory directions will come down the line.