The Spanish telecommunications group met with Ericsson and others to show how 5G will drive the future automobile.
The novel part of this demonstration involved the use of 5G in the 3.5 GHz band to simultaneously control autonomous driving and content consumption. He used an EZ10 autonomous driving electric minibus supplied by EasyMile, which contains an Ericsson 5G terminal and an information and entertainment platform from CarMedia.
The program showed a high data transfer capacity and a very low latency that allows the simultaneous downloading of high definition content; the creation of a work environment in the vehicle with virtual office applications and remote driving support based on the analysis and real-time processing of the telemetry data sent by the autonomous vehicle.
"5G technology has a lot to contribute in the field of connected vehicles," said Javier Gutiérrez, Director of Network Strategy and Development at Telefónica Spain. “In addition to downloading multimedia content, autonomous vehicles generate up to 4 TB of information daily from information collected by sensors, which means that a large bandwidth is needed to transfer this data in real time to the edge of the network. the network and also an extremely low latency. All to jointly process the data received by the vehicles of a given area and proceed to decision making, thus increasing safety in vehicle environments”.
“By 2023, 20% of the world population will have 5G coverage,” said Jorge Navais, Commercial Director of the Telefónica account at Ericsson. “It will have a huge impact in terms of user experience and the digital transformation of industries and cities. Ericsson has already signed 39 agreements to start 5G trials and to develop use cases like the one we are presenting today. With this demo, we take a look at the future and how 5G will enable autonomous driving, just one example among many possibilities. It also places Ericsson and Telefónica at the forefront of Spain's journey towards 5G."
This demonstration was part of a broader initiative by Telefónica called the 5G Technological Cities project that aims to provide 5G service to Segovia and Talavera de la Reina (the demo was in the latter). The official line is that they will become "5G living labs", which seems to be in keeping with some of the things happening in Italy as well. While this sort of thing does provide a bit of publicity for everyone involved, real-world dress rehearsals are probably an important way of figuring out what we're going to use new technology for.