Global connectivity remains a challenge in 2020, but there are solutions for automakers and mobility providers to consider.
That was one of many key takeaways from a webinar provided by Ward’s Auto, in which Magnus Gunnarsson, Head of Portfolio and Business Development for Connected Vehicles at Ericsson, offered an in-depth look at why connectivity is so important for businesses.
“No matter how you look at it there is massive growth in the number of vehicles with connectivity. Moderate estimates put us in the region of 400 million-plus vehicles by mid-decade,” said Gunnarsson during the webinar. “Moreover, each of those vehicles will have more connected services and there will be more data from each (of these) services that will need to be connected right.”
Gunnarsson expects to see an increase in the number of vehicles with connected services (400 million by 2025), and a massive growth in data transfer to and from those vehicles (1,000 times more data in 2025). It is one of the reasons that this topic has become increasingly important in product development, customer care, customer promise, and in our daily life — as users of connected vehicles.
“From there, this goes very much hand-in-hand with the next generation of mobile networks,” said Gunnarsson. “We have the basic connectivity, we have the basic telematics, we have the first type of use cases existing without (things like) 3G systems, which will take off with the advancement of 5G technology and which is now being rolled out across the world.”
The other expectation is that 5G will offer seamless, ubiquitous connectivity, perhaps by mid-decade. But there are a mountain of challenges to overcome first. For example, how will the business work? What can businesses like OEMs and mobility providers expect from their connectivity providers across the world and across different regions? And of course, there are differences between different countries, different regions, and different connectivity providers.
“One would think that in 2020 connectivity would work just as well as electricity does, right? You turn the switch on and it works, seamlessly, over all types of regions,” said Gunnarsson. “And what we know from experience is that for certain parts of the world, certain parts in your country, and certain parts in your region, the connectivity might not work as well as we might like it to.”
From a product development perspective, Gunnarsson said being an OEM or mobility provider is “really tricky” when designing a service that is built from the ground up to always be connected — especially when you cannot fully trust the connectivity at all times. “And that is what we call the global connectivity challenge,” said Gunnarsson.
Some of the challenges with connectivity include it being perceived as expensive, especially when vehicles are moving across borders and there are roaming issues. It is also a bit unpredictable for the company, or in this case OEMs and mobility providers — and both will need to consider the business case for it.
“How much will I actually pay for my connectivity over the lifetime of the vehicle? That becomes even more complicated when we look into connected vehicle services,” said Gunnarsson. “Basically, up to date, the connected vehicle services on any given connected vehicle, has been rather static.”
But in the new day and age he said users will be able to download their own services and those services might evolve over time, making it a little bit trickier when looking into how much data these services consume, when will the data be consumed, and how much the OEM, mobility provider, or even the customer will pay for the data.
There are several answers to this challenge, but Gunnarsson suggested that automakers take the universal connectivity route, which means they would have a single service to manage all connectivity, globally, regardless of which operator the devices connect to.
He also suggested that they minimize internal operations for connectivity management by monitoring, and providing maintenance and lifecycle management, for integrated connectivity providers. This is part one.
The second part involves being aware of service demand and network quality — so balancing the financial risks with the service experience and converging car and connectivity analytics to optimize the connected car experience. This means service planning, simulation, and enhancement (when planning and designing vehicles).
For operating and supporting the services/connectivity, OEMs would need to focus on problem management, customer care, and automation and machine learning, among other things.
Part two also focuses on data sources for predictive mobility, such as vehicle information and client information measurement, radio access network information and core network information, and road and traffic information and event-based information.
“When talking about awareness, the highest level of awareness (is) to predict not only what happened — but what will happen,” said Gunnarsson. “At Ericsson and (with) our partners, we are approaching this from a combination of different data sources: we use the vehicle information, cloud-based information, but also information from the radio access networks of the mobile network operators.”
He also said they use core network information connecting different network operators with each other. Combining this with things like roaming traffic information and maps offers Gunnarsson and his team a starting point to predict not only what happened, but what will happen.
“What we can do then is to make sure that, because we know where the vehicle is from GPS and cloud data and we know roughly how a network in that region will behave or in that area will behave, we can also start understating when is the optimal time for (the service to be) transferred or any data to be pushed towards that vehicle,” said Gunnarsson.
In his presentation, Gunnarsson talked about optimizing connectivity usage (data transfer) and reducing the cost of unnecessary data transfer by utilizing easy access to capabilities within the cellular network — and pushing data transfers when the conditions are optimal, which means considering the time, position of the vehicle, and quality of the connection.
Gunnarsson concluded the webinar with final comments about Ericsson looking at how the company can orchestrate connectivity globally.
“We’ve been looking at what type of systems do we have as Ericsson to make sure that we are employing a great level of intelligence to connectivity, and being sure that connectivity is being data-linked in a way that we can start pulling a lot of user data,” said Gunnarsson.
