For Truly Connected Cars, We Need to Wait for 5G

LAS VEGAS—CES 2022 is overflowing, and non just with the sudden rain deluge that's flooded some roads and even one of Google'southward booths. In add-on to the wet, CES is caught in a downpour of connected car announcements.

CES 2022 bug art From avant-garde diagnostics to artificial intelligence-powered driver assistance technologies to hyper-accurate mapping displays, they're all hither in varying stages of real-earth readiness. Yet, in that location's a single applied science thread that connects all these new and cracking smart machine innovations and we're hearing precious little about information technology considering information technology'south a bedrock requirement for all these gadgets: bandwidth. Smart cars demand reliable, secure, and very low-latency bandwidth or this entire vision of tomorrow's automobile will fade to vapor.

There oasis't been many connected motorcar bandwidth announcements at the show, there accept been some. Hither'south the rundown.

CES: Slim Pickings for 5G

CES isn't traditionally a mobile networking show, so a lack of 5G networking announcements wasn't surprising. Still, the most total silence on the subject was a footling surprising. Qualcomm'due south booth is the main effect here if you lot desire to discuss the future of mobile networking as it relates to connected cars. The company's booth sports several vehicles, including a Cadillac and a Maserati, which the company has retrofitted with various Qualcomm technical advances—one of them being a 5G-capable, Snapdragon-based communications module.

Qualcomm'south demo is focused mainly on yet another infotainment platform with all the usual streaming video bells and whistles, but what excited me nearly it is that while it'southward supposedly designed to employ today's 4G LTE networks, Qualcomm's also making sure it'll piece of work with tomorrow'southward 5G networks. Unfortunately, according to some coincidental conversation with the Qualcomm booth rep, the company doesn't see that 5G future condign the nowadays for at least two years and maybe as long as iv.

Samsung also mentioned 5G in relation to continued motorcar technologies, and also in a new telematics system that the visitor claims is "5G fix." The new system is known as Samsung's Telematics Command Unit (TCU). Built in collaboration with Harman and touted as a key component of Samsung'southward Intelligent Digital Cockpit, the organization combines an advanced audio organisation with new networking technologies that'll allow the TCU communicate with both today's 4G True cat 16 mobile networks besides every bit tomorrow'southward 5G nets. The visitor states information technology'll announce a partnership with a well-known European automaker to implement the TCU technology afterward this week.

In-Vehicle Bandwidth Goes Gig

Faster bandwidth to the auto means you'll also need much faster bandwidth inside the motorcar. Ane of the large-name announcements regarding in-vehicle bandwidth comes from heavyweights Cisco and Hyundai. The ii companies announced a partnership at CES that'll see loftier-speed networking technologies deployed to some Hyundai vehicle lines by 2022.

The alliance, originally announced back in 2022, is announcing a platform that essentially brings software-divers networking (SDN) to the car. While the announcement was a little hazy on the technical details, the outcome is that it's designed to leverage Hyundai's investment in legacy hardware while using software to provide a more secure and flexible in-car data network that's also faster: up to one gigabit per 2d (Gbps) according to Cisco spokespeople. That'll upgrade your automobile to roughly the same speed as your abode network if you purchased your router in the past 5 years. The speed, flexibility, and security advancements let Hyundai set the stage for hereafter innovations, including deject services and other engineering advancements (even further potential speed increases) past simply sending software updates to their vehicles.

Some of the utilize cases for the new platform that the companies are touting include low-latency communication with Hyundai datacenters to provide customers with diverse kinds of existent-fourth dimension information (mapping, traffic, weather) and even assuasive cars to communicate with smart city infrastructure, such equally parking meters or traffic lights.

Ruba Borno, VP of growth initiatives and main of staff to the CEO at Cisco, expressed excitement at the new platform, and even hinted the applied science might non be exclusive to Hyundai very long, "By creating a flexible, scalable, and secure platform, nosotros are allowing automotive companies to deliver meliorate cars—faster."

A visitor competing with Cisco in this space is Valens, which is touting its HDBaseT in-vehicle technology. Delivered to connected cars via Valens' HDBaseT Automotive solution, this engineering science is capable of multi-gigabit transmission speeds designed for high-speed, ultra-high-definition video, gigabit Ethernet data transmission, USB 2.0 device compatibility, and up to 100 watts of power, all delivered over a networking solution based on adept old copper twisted pair wiring. HDBaseT isn't new for CES 2022, only the visitor is touting more than mature solutions this year along with a rapidly growing HDBaseT vendor brotherhood that now includes more than 180 members.

Don't Forget Security

Last only not least on the connected car network shopping list is security. Fortunately, while details are understandably sparse, this topic isn't taboo anymore at CES. Both Cisco and Samsung brought data security front-and-center equally a messaging pillar in their new automotive networks, and there'due south a small but growing selection of vendors selling data security solutions specifically designed for tomorrow'south cars, including Thales e-Security (which didn't nourish CES) and Intrepid Control Systems, which did attend the show and specializes in QA control for avant-garde automotive platforms, including security systems. Intrepid fifty-fifty has a partnership with GM, so hopefully that sets the trend of car makers being proactive with regards to the data security needs of tomorrow's cars.

Nevertheless, the industry is advertising some truly avant-garde automobile technologies here at the show, peculiarly augmented reality for dashboard and infotainment purposes, AI-assisted democratic vehicle engineering, and hyper-accurate real-fourth dimension mapping technologies. These are all great developments, but each and every one requires a fatty data pipe from the cloud to the machine—the automobile in motion. You might get some of that with today's 4G, but it won't be enough to fully power whatever of the connected motorcar visions on display here today. For these visions to get reality, you demand the faster, low-to-zero latency data throughput speeds promised the states by 5G. Until our friends in the telecom industry deploy such networks, continued cars will continue to pitter-patter frontwards at an evolutionary footstep.