Tag: smart cars

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Technology The Industry

Smart Highways or Smart Cars?

It wasn’t too many years ago when you couldn’t read an article about broadband infrastructure without hearing about the need for smart highway infrastructure that was going to enable self-driving cars. There were various versions of how this would happen, but the predominant concept was that 5G networks along roads would communicate with cars and would enable efficient and safe travel by eliminating driver error by taking the driver out of the equation. This was one of the primary business cases for 5G promoted by the cellular carriers.

The idea went quiet for a variety of reasons, and I thought this idea was dead. I was surprised to recently hear about a $130 million project in Michigan to create a trial project for smart roads. This project will be for a 25-mile stretch of I-94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The project is described as creating the world’s most advanced road network for connected and automated vehicles.

There are a number of reasons that the industry has migrated almost all research into developing smart cars rather than smart roads.

First is the basic discussion of whether computing brains should be provided by centralized infrastructure or moved to the edge -in the self-driving car arena the edge is the smart car. Most of the effort by car manufacturers has been to make cars smarter. Google and other pioneers in the field decided that cars needed to be able to deal with all driving conditions and all roads rather than relying somehow on smart roads. This approach has taken a lot longer than first predicted, but cars are getting better at this every year as manufacturers introduce new features.

The best arguments against the smart road are practical. First is the classic chicken and egg issue. Do we really need to wait until there are smart roads everywhere (or at least in a large percentage of places) before the self-driving car industry makes any economic sense? Let’s say this corridor in the project works as promised. What benefits or incentives does this one stretch of road provide until there are hundreds of times more smart roads with the same features? Are any car manufacturers going to develop features that rely on smart roads until there are enough smart roads for this to make sense? Will people be willing to pay more for a car with the smart road features if it can only be used on limited stretches of smart roads?

And then there is the cost issue. This project costs over $5 million per mile of roadway. I assume that construction costs will drop if the technology is expanded. Let’s assume this might cost $4 million per mile. There are over 430,000 miles of major roads in the country, including interstate highways and other major divided arterial highways. It would cost over $1.7 trillion to bring this technology to just those major highways. Who is going to pay for that? There are 276 million cars in the country, and that equates to almost $6,300 per vehicle. I’ve thought about this several times over the last decade, and I can’t envision this being a priority compared to how $1.7 billion could be used elsewhere. Worse yet, that huge cost only brings the solution to major highways. Is that enough miles for this to be worth it? How do driverless trucks navigate when they have to get off the major highways? There are over 2 additional million miles of paved roadways in the country.

But just suppose the country decides that smart roads are an important national priority, and we spend the trillions to get a smart highway system that revolutionizes product delivery nationwide. There are some obvious advantages to that vision of having driverless vehicles shuttling goods across the country 24/7, eliminating truckers. What about the cost of maintaining this smart road network? This network will consist of sensors along and embedded in roads and 5G and other wireless technologies to communicate with vehicles. We know that many of these technologies only have an effective life of around ten years. That means a perpetual huge annual budget to keep the electronics network upgraded and functioning. There also would be a lot of people needed to keep the smart roads operating properly. I can see why companies like Cavnue and the cellular carriers love the idea of the smart road – it’s a perpetual, guaranteed revenue stream for them. But I ask again about who would be willing to pay for this huge ongoing expense?

When I first heard about smart roads my first thought was to ask what happens when the smart road networks break down, as they inevitably will do. What happens on a smart road during the time when the road isn’t smart? Does traffic stop or slow to a crawl? I really thought this was an idea that had been put to bed. But I guess the lure of making money from building, operating, and updating a new kind of infrastructure is just too lucrative to let die – even if it is impractical.

The project is being described as a public-private partnership, and I assume that means that public grants are helping to fund this, perhaps out of ARPA money. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Michigan, and I know how far $130 million would go to bring broadband to unserved homes – probably including some near this smart road. I am never opposed to projects that push innovation, and if this is intended as a test bed to explore a lot of new ideas I would think this is a worthwhile idea. But Cavnue is touting this as the first of many such projects that will be replicated across Michigan and the rest of the country. I honestly don’t get it and I invite anybody to tell me why this is a good idea.

 

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Technology

AT&T and Connected Vehicles

AT&T just released a blog talking about their connected vehicle product. This blog paints a picture of where AT&T is at today and where they hope to be headed into the future in this market niche.

For a company like AT&T, the only reason to be excited about a new market niche is the creation of a new revenue stream. AT&T claims to have 24 million connected cars on its network as of the end of 3Q 2018. They also claim 3 million additional connected fleet vehicles. They also have over 1 million customers who are buying mobile WiFi hotspots from AT&T.

What does that look like as a revenue stream? AT&T has relationships with 29 global car manufacturers. Most new cars today come with some kind of connectivity plan that’s free to a car buyer for a short time, usually 3 to 6 months. When the free trial is over consumers must subscribe in order to retain the connectivity service.

As an example of how this works, all new Buicks and Fiats come with AT&T’s UConnect Access for a 6-month free trial period. This service provides unlimited broadband to the vehicle for streaming video or for feeding the on-board mapping system. After the trial customers must subscribe to the service at a monthly rate of $14.99 per month – or they can buy a la carte for connectivity at $9.99 per day or $34.99 per month.

In the blog AT&T touts a relationship with Subaru. The company provides a trial subscription to Starlink that provides on-board navigation on a screen plus safety features like the ability to call for roadside assistance or to locate a stolen vehicle. Subaru offers different plans for different vehicles that range from a Starlink trial of between 4-months and 3-years. Once the trial is over the cost of extending Starlink is $49 for the first year and then $99 per year to extend just the security package or $149 per year to extend the whole service. Starlink is not part of AT&T, so only some portion of this revenue goes to the carrier.

I wonder how many people extend these free trials and become paying customers? I have to think that the majority of the AT&T connected vehicles are under the Starlink relationship which has been around for many years. Families that drive a lot and watch a lot of video in a vehicle might find the UConnect Access to be a much better alternative than using cellular data plans. People who want the feature of locating their car if stolen might like the Starlink. However, most drivers probably don’t see a value in these plans. Most of the features offered in these packages are available as part of everybody’s cellular data plans using the Bluetooth connectivity in these vehicles.

The vehicle fleet business, however, is intriguing. Companies can use this connectivity to keep drivers connected to the home office and core software systems. This can also be done with cellphones, but I can think of several benefits to building this directly into the vehicle.

The second half of their blog discusses the possibility for 5G and automated cars. That’s the future revenue stream the company is banking on, and probably one of their biggest hopes for 5G. They have two hopes for 5G vehicle connectivity:

  • They hope to provide the connectivity between vehicles using 5G and the cloud. They believe that cars will be connected to the 5G network in order to ‘learn’ from other vehicle’s driving experience in the immediate vicinity.
  • They also hope to eventually provide broadband to driverless cars where passengers will be interested in being connected while traveling.

The first application of connecting nearby vehicles is no guarantee. It all depends on the technology path chosen to power driverless vehicles. There is one school of thought that says that the majority of the brains and decision making will be done by on-board computers, and if cars connect to nearby vehicles it will be through the use of on-board wireless communication. AT&T is hoping for the alternate approach where that connectivity is done in the cloud – but that’s going to require a massive investment in small cell sites everywhere. If the cloud solution is not the preferred technology then companies like AT&T will have no incentive to place 5G cell sites along the millions of miles of roads.

This is one of those chicken and egg situations. I liken it to smart city technology. A decade ago many predicted that cities would need mountains of fiber to support smart cities – but today most such applications are being done wirelessly. Any company banking on a fiber-based solution got left behind. At this point, nobody can predict the technology that will ultimately be used by smart cars. However, since the 5G technology needs the deployment of a massive ubiquitous cellular network, the simpler solution is to do it some other way.

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Technology The Industry

The Return of Edge Computing

We just went through a decade where the majority of industry experts told us that most of our computing needs were going to move to the cloud. But it seems that that trend is starting to reverse somewhat and there are many applications where we are seeing the return of edge computing. This trend will have big implications for broadband networks.

Traditionally everything we did involved edge computing – or the use of local computers and servers. But a number of big companies like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM convinced corporate America that there were huge benefits of cloud computing. And cloud computing spread to small businesses and homes and almost every one of us works in the cloud to some extent. These benefits are real and include such things as:

  • Reduced labor costs from not having to maintain an in-house IT staff.
  • Disaster recovery of data due to storing data at multiple sites
  • Reduced capital expenditures on computer hardware and software
  • Increased collaboration due to having a widely dispersed employee base on the same platform
  • The ability to work from anywhere there is a broadband connection.

But we’ve also seen some downsides to cloud computing:

  • No computer system is immune from outages and an outage in a cloud network can take an entire company out of service, not just a local branch.
  • A security breach into a cloud network exposes the whole company’s data.
  • Cloud networks are subject to denial of service attacks
  • Loss of local control over software and systems – a conversion to cloud often means losing valuable legacy systems, and functionality from these systems is often lost.
  • Not always as cheap as hoped for.

The recent move away from cloud computing comes from computing applications that need huge amounts of computing power done in real time. The most obvious examples of this is the smart car. Some of the smart cars under development run as many as 20 servers onboard the car, making them a driving datacenter. There is no hope of ever moving the brains from smart cars or drones to the cloud due to the huge amounts of data that must be passed quickly between the car’s sensors and its computers. Any external connection is bound to have too much latency to make true real-time decisions.

But smart cars are not the only edge devices that don’t make sense on a cloud network. Some other such applications include:

  • Drones have the same concerns as cars. It’s hard to imagine a broadband network that can be designed to always stay in contact with a flying drone or even a sidewalk delivery drone.
  • Industrial robots. Many new industrial robots need to make decisions in real-time during the manufacturing process. Robots are no longer just being used to assemble things, but are also being used to handle complex tasks like synthesizing chemicals, which requires real-time feedback.
  • Virtual reality. Today’s virtual reality devices need extremely low latencies in order to deliver a coherent image and it’s expected that future generations of VR will use significantly more bandwidth and be even more reliant on real-time communications.
  • Medical devices like MRIs also require low latencies in order to pass huge data files rapidly. As we built artificial intelligence into hospital monitors the speed requirement for real-time decision making will become even more critical.
  • Electric grids. It turns out that it doesn’t take much of a delay to knock down an electric grid, and so local feedback is needed to make split-second decisions when problems pop up on grids.

We are all familiar with a good analogy of the impact of performing electronic tasks from a distance. Anybody my age remembers when you could pick up a telephone, have instant dialtone, and then also got a quick ring response from the phone at the other end. But as we’ve moved telephone switches farther from customers it’s no longer unusual to wait seconds to get a dialtone, and to wait even more agonizing seconds to hear the ringing starting at the other end. Such delays are annoying for a telephone call but deadly for many computing applications.

Finally, one of the drivers to move to more edge computing is the desire to cut down on the amount of bandwidth that must be transmitted. Consider a factory where thousands of devices are monitoring specific operations during the manufacturing process. The idea of sending this mountains of data to a distant location for processing seems almost absurd when local servers can handle the data at faster speeds with lower latency. But cloud computing is certainly not going to go away and is still the best network for many applications. In this factory example it would still make sense to send alarms and other non-standard data to some remote monitoring location even if the data needed to keep a machine running is done locally.

 

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Technology The Industry

Machine Generated Broadband

One of the more interesting predictions in the latest Cisco annual internet forecast is that there will be more machine-to-machine (M2M) connections on the Internet by 2021 than there are people using smartphones, desktops, laptops and tablets.

Today there are a little over 11 billion human-used machines connected to the Internet. That number is growing steadily and Cisco predicts that by 2021 there will be over 13 billion such devices using the Internet. That prediction also assumes that total users on the internet will grow from a worldwide 44% broadband penetration in 2016 to a 58% worldwide penetration of people that have connectivity to the Internet by 2021.

But the use of M2M devices is expected to grow a lot faster. There are fewer than 6 billion such devices in use today and Cisco is projecting that will grow to nearly 14 billion by 2021.

So what is machine-to-machine communication? Broadly speaking it is any technology that allows networked devices to exchange information and perform actions without assistance from humans. This encompasses a huge range of different devices including:

  • Cloud data center. When something is stored in the cloud, most cloud services create duplicate copies of data at multiple data centers to protect against a failure at any given data center. While this does not represent a huge number of devices when measured on the scale of billions, the volume of traffic between data centers is gigantic.
  • Telemetry. Telemetry has been around since before the Internet. Telemetry includes devices that monitor and transmit operational data from field locations of businesses, with the most common examples being devices that monitor the performance of electric networks and water systems. But the devices used for telemetry will grow rapidly as our existing utility grids are upgraded to become smart grids and when telemetry is used by farmers to monitor crops and animals, used to monitor wind and solar farms, and used to monitor wildlife and many other things in the environment.
  • Home Internet of Things. Much of the growth of devices will come from an explosion of devices used for the Internet of Things. In the consumer market that will include all of the smart devices we put into homes such as burglar alarms, cameras, smart door locks and smart appliances of many kinds.
  • Business IoT. There is expected to be an even greater proliferation of IoT devices for businesses. For example, modern factories that include robots are expected to have numerous devices that monitor and direct the performance of machines. Hospitals are expected to replace wires with wireless networked devices used to monitor patients. Retail stores are all investigating devices that track customers through the store to assist in shopping and to offer inducements to purchase.
  • Smart Cars and Trucks. By 2021 it’s expected that most new cars and trucks will routinely communicate with the Internet. This does not necessarily imply self-driving vehicles, but rather that all new vehicles will have M2M capabilities.
  • Smart Cities. A number of large cities are looking to improve living conditions using smart city technologies. This is going to require the deployment of huge numbers of sensors that will be used to improve things like traffic flow, monitoring for crimes and improvement everyday things like garbage collection and snow removal.
  • Wearables. Today there are huge numbers of fitness monitors, but it’s expected that it will become routine for people to wear health monitors of various types that keep track of vital statistics and monitor to catch problems at an early stage.
  • Gray Areas. There are also a lot of machine-to-machine communications that come from computers, laptops and smartphones. I see that my phone uses data even at those times when I’m not using it. Our devices now query the cloud to look for updates, to make back-ups of our data or to take care of other tasks that our apps do in the background without our knowledge or active participation.

Of course, having more machine-to-machine devices doesn’t mean that this traffic will grow to dominate web traffic. Cisco predicts that by 2021 that 83% of the traffic on the web will be video of some sort. While most of that video will be used for entertainment, it will also include huge piles of broadband usage for surveillance cameras and other video sources.

If you are interested in M2M developments I recommend M2M: Machine2Machine Magazine. This magazine contains hundreds of articles on the various fields of M2M communications.

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