China Telecom's TeleAI Unveils 'AI Flow' Network at WAIC: Drones Beam Tokens Directly via Satellite, Wins Top Award

At WAIC 2026, TeleAI (China Telecom AI Research Institute) demonstrated a technology that eliminates the need for ground relay equipment in drone communications: lightweight drones can now connect directly to satellites, encoding captured video into token sequences and transmitting them back to command centers. The integrated AI-communication-network framework is called 'AI Flow' (智传网).

One day before the conference opened, AI Flow had already received WAIC's highest honor, the SAIL (Superior AI Leader) Award in the Applicative category. According to QbitAI, TeleAI has achieved a domestic first by enabling lightweight drones to directly connect to satellites for stable real-time HD video transmission.

Traditional emergency communication requires drones to stay close to ground receivers, which then relay via satellite. Bandwidth limitations make real-time HD video transmission difficult. AI Flow fundamentally changes what gets transmitted: a neural encoder on the sending end understands video content, extracting scene semantics and motion states as compact token sequences. After crossing the satellite link, a generative model on the receiving end reconstructs the video.

This 'computing for bandwidth' approach is underpinned by TeleAI's 'Capacity-Reconciliation Law' — communication and computing resources can be traded under certain conditions. Audio transmission achieves 0.266Kbps, roughly 500x more efficient than traditional codecs. Video transmission at 100Kbps delivers what previously required 3600Kbps for 1080P@30fps footage.

AI Flow's capabilities extend beyond drones. TeleAI has applied the same logic to cross-city robot teleoperation, reducing end-to-end latency to 20-50 milliseconds over 5G networks. Robots entering wilderness areas without cellular coverage can still maintain satellite links for video return and remote command reception. Underwater HD video transmission has also been demonstrated using TeleAI's self-developed 'air-sea cross-domain submersible.'

Real-world deployment is already underway. TeleAI and China Telecom's emergency response unit have deployed over 1,000 AI Flow-based devices across all 31 provinces for flood prevention this year. Meanwhile, China Telecom's video network covering 100 million cameras has seen storage requirements reduced to 1/40th of traditional levels — footage previously retained for just one week can now be stored for nearly a year.

TeleAI is also working to deploy the AI Flow decoding model on orbiting satellites, enabling on-orbit computation to further reduce reliance on ground infrastructure. From drones to robots to underwater vehicles to satellites in orbit, AI Flow is building toward a single vision: a next-generation communication network purpose-built for the AI era — one that moves tokens, model capabilities, and task instructions between intelligent devices anywhere on the planet.