A group of telco vendors has joined forces with the automotive industry to drive the development and uptake of 5G services for connected cars.
Called the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA), its founding members are: car makers Audi, BMW, and Daimler; telco vendors Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia; and chip makers, Intel and Qualcomm.
The new association will develop, test and promote communications solutions, support standardization and accelerate commercial availability and global market penetration, the group says.
According to them, the goal is to address society’s connected mobility and road safety needs with applications such as connected automated driving, ubiquitous access to services and integration into smart cities and intelligent transportation.
The association believes that with next generation 5G mobile networks and continued strong LTE evolution, which includes Cellular Vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication, the focus of information and communication technologies (ICT) shifts towards the Internet of Things and the digitization of industries.
It is expected that 5G will better support mission-critical communications for safer driving and will further support enhanced vehicle-to-everything communications and connected mobility solutions.
These new solutions bring new technological and business opportunities for both the automotive and ICT industries and the members of the association say they will closely collaborate to realize the full potential together.
The association will also address key technical and regulatory issues, leveraging next generation mobile networks and integrating vehicle platforms with connectivity, networking and computing solutions.
The main activities of the association include:
• Defining and harmonizing use cases, technical requirements and implementation strategies.
• Supporting standardization and regulatory bodies, certification and approval processes.
• Addressing vehicle-to-everything technology requirements, such as wireless connectivity, security, privacy, authentication, distributed cloud architectures and more.
• Running joint innovation and development projects leading to integrated solutions, interoperability testing, large scale pilots and trial deployments.
Alfons Pfaller, Head of Infotainment Development, AUDI AG says, “Connected cars will shape the future of individual mobility, and next generation mobile networks will take car to x connectivity to a new level. The key to success is in cross-industry collaboration. This is why we set up the 5G Automotive Association where experts from all relevant fields are teaming up.”
