42 remote pilots later, Orange Côte d’Ivoire bets on drones to keep its network up 🚁 🇨🇮

Cliquez ici pour lire en français

In late September 2026, in Yamoussoukro, 42 Orange Côte d’Ivoire employees officially received their drone remote-pilot certificates after 1,000 hours of training. Among them are five photogrammetry specialists and one information-systems expert. According to the operator, the qualification is meant to make its crews safer, streamline maintenance and improve the quality of service subscribers get.

Trained as drone remote pilots 🚁

The certification is part of a project Orange Côte d’Ivoire has been running since 2022. Since then, the operator has been rolling out a drone-assisted inspection system to check the condition of its infrastructure, including telecom towers, buildings and solar fields.

After early trials, the project moved to full-scale roll-out in 2025, which the operator calls its « industrialization » phase. In 2026, certifying the field teams adds to that momentum.

The stated aim is to limit technicians’ exposure to the risks of working on infrastructure, while making operations more efficient and keeping maintenance costs under control.

Drones with more than one job 📡

Drones are not only used to inspect towers. According to the operator, they can also support other telecom-infrastructure work. 3D modeling is one of the applications it has developed, and it is said to help improve radio coverage in populated areas.

There is also an educational strand for children, who are introduced to designing, programming and flying drones. In this way, the technology is gradually becoming a tool that can serve several operational and teaching needs.

A fully structured inspection chain 💻

For Orange Côte d’Ivoire, the challenge is no longer just getting drones in the air. It is about building a complete operational chain, from the intervention request to the final report.

In practice, requesters submit their request on iFlex, a web and mobile app that specifies the site to inspect, the planned period, the equipment used and the designated remote pilot. Once managers approve it, technicians travel to the site and fly the drone, which captures high-definition technical images of the infrastructure being checked.

The app then automatically saves the photos and GPS coordinates. That data is used to produce reports for the operations teams.

DroneAI Inspection speeds up analysis with AI 🤖

To process field data faster, the system also includes an artificial-intelligence module called DroneAI Inspection. The tool automatically analyzes images using two models, YOLO and ResNet50, to identify several types of anomalies on infrastructure.

According to the operator, the technology reportedly detects aging with 86% accuracy, rust and oxidation at 92%, verticality defects at 95% and thermal overheating at 97%. The operator also says automation cuts the time needed to examine a site from three or four hours of manual analysis to under 30 minutes.

The platform also assigns each piece of infrastructure a criticality level, which makes it easier to rank sites and prioritize technicians’ work.

12 drones, 83 inspections 📊

This scale-up is already producing operational results, according to the operator. Orange Côte d’Ivoire currently runs a fleet of 12 drones. Across two maintenance campaigns, they carried out 83 inspections in several parts of the country, including Yamoussoukro, Abengourou, Bouaké, Daloa and San-Pedro.

No incident was reported across these operations. By avoiding routine manual climbs up towers, the operator reduces its technicians’ exposure to the risks of those jobs.

Spotting problems early 🔎

Beyond cutting risk, automated image analysis could help identify some forms of deterioration earlier. Spotting corrosion or cracks could allow a fix before a network outage occurs.

Drones, geolocation, 3D modeling and AI are gradually being folded into a single maintenance chain.

For Orange Côte d’Ivoire, the approach is meant to make its infrastructure inventory more reliable, better target interventions and, more broadly, improve the quality of its networks and subscriber services.

Can drones and AI really make telecom infrastructure maintenance safer and more efficient? Tell us what you think in the comments.