so ive been doing tower inspections for about two years now, mostly with a Zenmuse Z30 on an M300 and honestly the optical zoom has been doing the job fine for most carriers we work with. but lately we keep getting RFPs that are asking for lidar deliverables and i'm trying to figure out if its actually something the clients need or if they just heard the word lidar and threw it in the spec.

the towers we deal with are mostly monopoles and lattice structures, occasional guyed wire setups out in rural areas. the clients want things like sector antenna alignment, mount condition, coax routing, that kind of stuff. i genuinely dont see what lidar gives you over a 30x optical zoom with good overlap and a methodical flight pattern. maybe for the structural analysis side? but thats usually a separate engagement anyway.

anyone here actually running lidar on telecom work and finding it earns its keep or is it mostly a box-checking thing at this point

honestly in my experience the lidar ask is almost always a spec-writing thing where someone copy pasted requirements from a bridge or utility corridor job and didnt really think about whether it applies. for telecom structure inspection the visual data is what matters 99% of the time. you're looking at hardware condition, not trying to model a point cloud of rebar.

that said i did one job last year where the carrier actually wanted deformation analysis on an older self-support lattice that had some history of wind events and for that the lidar made sense. we paired it with the visual pass anyway so the scope was just bigger. but for routine inspection cycles i wouldnt bother pitching it unless they're specifically asking for structural modeling output.

we run an L1 on M300 for some of our utility corridor work but havent crossed into telecom yet. from what you're describing it does sound like overkill. the Z30 at proper standoff distances should give you more than enough resolution for mount and hardware condition. lidar isnt gonna tell you if a jumper cable is chafing against a mounting strut, your camera will.