Re: LTE Data Plans
"You can buy a 10MB data plan for only $5/month which should be more than enough for GPS data polled every five seconds."
Let's assume that the data is neatly compartmentalized and compressed so that it can fit into a single 512-byte UDP packet, and that there will be a 128-byte response packet to indicate that the data has been received. If you think the protocol would end up being this light, you are quite the optimist, but let's go with it.
(512 bytes + 128 bytes)/ 5 seconds * 1 minute / 60 seconds = 7680 bytes / minute of flight time
10 megabytes * 1024 kilobytes / 1 megabyte * 1024 bytes / 1 kilobyte = 10485760 bytes per month
10485760 bytes / 1 month / (7680 bytes / 1 minute) = 1365.333 minutes of flight time (maximum) per month
In other words, a maximum flight time per month of about twenty two hours. Sure, the very casual hobbyist might not be up for longer than that. If someone's using their drone for aerial photography, data collection, or simply really likes the hobby, they won't be happy with that limitation. And this limit only applies if no data is sent, at all, other than the GPS check-in. And it relies on the provider using binary megabytes rather than decimal ones. And still costs $60 per year per drone.
In addition, this fails to solve any of the other problems noted in the article, such as requiring decommissioning or costly retrofitting of all the drones in existence today and the problems making this requirement work where cellular coverage is less than perfect.