Picture this: self-driving cars and delivery drones navigate busy roads, while traffic-calming systems adjust in response. Passengers enjoy in-car infotainment, confident that their safety – and that of surrounding people and vehicles – is protected by a robust on-board system.
This is the ultimate autonomous vehicle (AV) vision.
However, the ability for AVs to communicate with networks, with each other and with the built environment – on a commercial, widely-deployed basis – is still very much in developmental stages. These stages, based on guidelines set by the Society of Automotive Engineers, range on a scale from zero to five. As vehicles progress higher on the scale to become more autonomous, the number of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) features and the integration of those systems in the vehicles increases.
Despite the different levels of maturity of these use cases, the critical infrastructure required to connect autonomous vehicles to their environment remains the same: from smaller factory environments supporting dozens of autonomous robots to the ultimate AV vision described above, every AV requires 5G infrastructure to operate more safely than a human.
However, with different consumer use cases at different stages of progression, how can communications service providers (CSP)s be confident that they’ll see a strong return on investment? How can they support the trajectory of consumer AV, whilst ensuring this journey makes good business sense?
The answer lies in supply chain 4.0. By delivering the 5G infrastructure that will eventually be needed to support smart cities and consumer AVs first in the more limited last-mile delivery, smart factory and supply chain environments, CSPs can position themselves to eventually take the front seat in the consumer AV market. Addressing and overcoming challenges in the supply chain will help CSPs to accelerate monetization in preparation for future large-scale rollout of autonomous and connected technology.
The post Hey, where’s my (autonomous) car? appeared first on RCR Wireless News.