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

LAS VEGAS—CES 2018 is overflowing, and not just with the sudden rain deluge that's flooded some roads and even one of Google's booths. In addition to the wet, CES is caught in a downpour of connected car announcements.

From advanced diagnostics to artificial intelligence-powered driver assist technologies to hyper-accurate mapping displays, they're all here in varying stages of real-world readiness. However, there's a single technology thread that connects all these new and nifty smart car innovations and we're hearing precious little about it considering it's a bedrock requirement for all these gadgets: bandwidth. Smart cars need reliable, secure, and very low-latency bandwidth or this entire vision of tomorrow's car will fade to vapor.

There haven't been many connected car bandwidth announcements at the show, there have been some. Here's 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 near total silence on the subject was a little surprising. Qualcomm's booth is the main event here if you want 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's demo is focused mainly on yet another infotainment platform with all the usual streaming video bells and whistles, but what excited me about it is that while it's supposedly designed to utilize today's 4G LTE networks, Qualcomm's also making sure it'll work with tomorrow's 5G networks. Unfortunately, according to some casual conversation with the Qualcomm booth rep, the company doesn't see that 5G future becoming the present for at least two years and possibly as long as four.

Samsung also mentioned 5G in relation to connected car technologies, and also in a new telematics system that the company claims is "5G ready." The new system is known as Samsung's Telematics Control Unit (TCU). Built in collaboration with Harman and touted as a central component of Samsung's Intelligent Digital Cockpit, the system combines an advanced audio system with new networking technologies that'll let the TCU communicate with both today's 4G Cat 16 mobile networks as well as tomorrow's 5G nets. The company states it'll announce a partnership with a well-known European automaker to implement the TCU technology later this week.

In-Vehicle Bandwidth Goes Gig

Faster bandwidth to the car means you'll also need much faster bandwidth inside the car. One of the big-name announcements regarding in-vehicle bandwidth comes from heavyweights Cisco and Hyundai. The two companies announced a partnership at CES that'll see high-speed networking technologies deployed to some Hyundai vehicle lines by 2019.

The alliance, originally announced back in 2016, is announcing a platform that essentially brings software-defined networking (SDN) to the car. While the announcement was a little hazy on the technical details, the upshot 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 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) according to Cisco spokespeople. That'll upgrade your car to roughly the same speed as your home network if you purchased your router in the past five years. The speed, flexibility, and security advancements let Hyundai set the stage for future innovations, including cloud services and other technology advancements (even further potential speed increases) by simply sending software updates to their vehicles.

Some of the use cases for the new platform that the companies are touting include low-latency communication with Hyundai datacenters to provide customers with various kinds of real-time information (mapping, traffic, weather) and even allowing cars to communicate with smart city infrastructure, such as parking meters or traffic lights.

Ruba Borno, VP of growth initiatives and chief of staff to the CEO at Cisco, expressed excitement at the new platform, and even hinted the technology might not be exclusive to Hyundai very long, "By creating a flexible, scalable, and secure platform, we are allowing automotive companies to deliver better cars—faster."

A company 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 technology 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 good old copper twisted pair wiring. HDBaseT isn't new for CES 2018, but the company is touting more mature solutions this year along with a rapidly growing HDBaseT vendor alliance that now includes more than 180 members.

Don't Forget Security

Last but 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 as a messaging pillar in their new automotive networks, and there's a small but growing selection of vendors selling data security solutions specifically designed for tomorrow's cars, including Thales e-Security (which didn't attend CES) and Intrepid Control Systems, which did attend the show and specializes in QA control for advanced automotive platforms, including security systems. Intrepid even 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.

Still, the industry is advertising some truly advanced auto technologies here at the show, especially augmented reality for dashboard and infotainment purposes, AI-assisted autonomous vehicle technology, and hyper-accurate real-time mapping technologies. These are all great developments, but each and every one requires a fat data pipe from the cloud to the car—the car in motion. You might get some of that with today's 4G, but it won't be enough to fully power any of the connected car visions on display here today. For these visions to become reality, you need the faster, low-to-zero latency data throughput speeds promised us by 5G. Until our friends in the telecom industry deploy such networks, connected cars will continue to creep forward at an evolutionary pace.

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This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.