Monthly Archives: May 2023

GM Wants to Curate Your Car Experience

General Motors recently announced that it is going to stop supporting Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in some of its vehicles. These are smartphone mirroring apps that let a driver use their cellphone to connect to music, get driving directions, listen to eBooks, etc. GM announced that it plans to block the smartphone connection capability and will instead run a Google infotainment suite that includes Google Maps, Google Assistant, Spotify, and other apps that will be built into the dashboard display.

The company is not alone, and other companies like Mercedes and VW don’t like smartphone mirroring. GM says that it is doing this to take back control over customers and the in-car experience. I had to pause at that statement because I can’t think of a time when carmakers had that kind of control.

An article in Light Reading quoted an analyst saying that this means that the bandwidth used by the average car would grow from a few hundred megabytes per month to 4-8 gigabytes per month. That seems like a gigantic increase in bandwidth to me to take over the functions that were already going through a cellphone. Does this mean that the average driver really uses 4-8 gigabytes per month on the cellphone while driving? That can’t be true, and there is more at play here.

This raises a lot of questions for me. Does this finally mean that AT&T will reach its dream of requiring car owners to subscribe to a cellular subscription? That’s something the company has been angling for since the first conversations about smart cars and 5G. It seems likely that the cost of this service will be embedded in the cost of the car for the first year, but will all car owners be required to subscribe to this service when the paid year lapses? You might not have a choice if you can’t use your cell phone. Perhaps the car makers will pay this for a longer period if gaining control of the customer experience can generate additional monetary benefits higher than the cost of the cellular subscription.

Car companies have been trying to force subscriptions on car owners for years with the OnStar service. But most people drop that service at the end of the free period after buying a new car. I may be wrong, but I can’t see most car owners willing to buy a new monthly data subscription. There is no doubt that a 4–8 gigabyte cellular subscription is not going to come cheap.

Carmakers wouldn’t be considering this unless it will make them money. I can think of several ways this could financially benefit them. They might get a share of any revenues paid to AT&T for a subscription. I have to imagine Google will pay them for getting access to a car’s data – having a car connected to a cellular plan will let car makers gather detailed analytics on how the car is being driven, and I imagine that creates a revenue opportunity for selling driver data to insurance companies and others. A car is not going to use 8 gigabytes of data monthly by connecting only to GPS and listening to music. That much data has to mean transferring a lot of base analytics about the car and the driver. I can’t imagine paying for a subscription that would let GM and Google spy on me.

This also raises questions about tying my car to a cellular carrier. The new FCC maps for the big cellular companies are a joke. There are huge areas of the country that have little or no cellular coverage. I live in Appalachia, and I don’t have to drive far to find areas with no cell coverage. One town we visit is Boone, NC, and over half of the drive between here and there has zero cell coverage. How will car companies deal with irate customers that require a service that doesn’t function where they live? My wife listens to an eBook from her phone on that drive – I know how upset she would be if that no longer works because she can’t connect her cellphone to the car speakers.

I’m not sure why carmakers think folks want or will accept this. I might be the exception, but I would never buy a car that forced this on me unless I had the option to disable it. I don’t want to be curated and monitored by my carmaker. Their relationship with me ends the day I pay for the car. My wife avidly dislikes Android and wouldn’t buy a car that forced her to connect to Google and Android instead of her preferred IOs. If GM or any other company mandates this, we’d take them off our list of cars to consider.

Shutting Down Obsolete Technologies

There was an interesting statement during the recent Verizon first quarter earnings report call. The company admitted that shutting down the 3G cellular networks cost it about 1.1 million retail cellular customers along with the corresponding revenues.

This was long expected because there are still a lot of places where 3G technology was the only cellular signal available to rural customers living in remote areas. There were also a lot of people still happy with 3G flip phones even where 4G was available. Some of these customers will likely come back with 4G phones, but many might be angry with Verizon for cutting them off and go elsewhere.

Verizon has been trying to shut down the 3G network for at least five years. Its original plans got delayed due to discussions with the FCC and then got further delayed because of the pandemic – it didn’t seem like a good idea to cut folks dead when cellular stores were shuttered.

This change was inevitable. The bandwidth that can be delivered on the 3G networks is tiny. Most of you remember when you used 3G and a flip phone to check the weather and sports scores. Cellular carriers want to repurpose the spectrum used for 3G to support 4G and 5G. This is something that is inevitable – technologies become obsolete and have to be upgraded or replaced. The 3G transition is particularly abrupt, because the only possible transition is to cut the 3G signal dead, and 3G phones become bricks.

All of the technologies used for broadband and telecom eventually become obsolete. I remember when we used ISDN to deliver 128 Kbps broadband to businesses. I remember working with n-carrier and other technologies for creating data connections between central offices. Telephone switches took up a big room instead of being housed inside a small computer. The earlier version of DOCSIS technology were largely abandoned and upgraded to new technology. BPON became GPON and is now becoming XGS-PON.

Most transitions to new technologies are phased in over time. You might be surprised that there are still working ISDN lines chugging along that are being used to monitor remote sensors. There are still tiny rural cable companies operating the early versions of DOCSIS. But the industry inevitably replaces ancient technology in the same way that none of you are reading this blog on an IBM 5150 or a Macintosh 128k.

But some upgrades are painful. There were folks who lost cellular coverage when 3G was cut dead since they lived in a place that might not be able to receive the 4G replacement. A 3G phone needed only a tiny amount of bandwidth to operate – at levels that newer phones would perceive to be far under one bar of service.

The other painful technology replacement that keeps getting press is the big telcos killing off the copper networks. When copper is cut off in an area, the traditional copper landlines and DSL go dead. In some cases, customers are offered to move to a fiber network. The price might be higher, but such customers are offered a good permanent technology replacement. But not every DSL customer in a city that loses copper service is offered a fiber alternative. Customers find themselves likely having to pay $30 or $40 more to move to the cable company.

In rural areas, the telcos often offer to move customers to wireless. For a customer that lives within a decent distance from a cell tower, this should be an upgrade. Fixed wireless delivered for only a few miles should be faster than rural DSL. But like all wireless technologies, there is a distance limitation around any given tower, and the FWA signal isn’t going to work for everybody. Some customers that lose rural copper are left with whatever alternatives are available – because the telephone company is basically abandoning them. In many rural areas, the broadband alternatives are dreadful – which is why many were sticking with slow rural DSL.

I hear a lot of complaints from folks who lose traditional copper who are upset that they lose the ability to use services that work on copper technology, such as fax machines and medical monitors. It may sound uncaring, but these folks need to buy something newer that works with today’s broadband. Those are the kind of changes that are inevitable with technology upgrades. Just like you can’t take your old Macintosh to get fixed at Best Buy, you can’t keep using a technology that nobody supports. That’s an inevitable result of technology getting better over time. This is not a comfort to the farmer who just lost his 3G cell coverage – but there is no way to keep older technology operating forever.