5G connected car clique lets Vodafone join its gang

After a bunch of important companies formed their own gang to work on making cars cleverer, Vodafone has infiltrated the ranks.

Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Intel, and Qualcomm created the 5G car club clique (AKA 5G Automotive Association) a couple of weeks ago, but someone forgot to put telcos on the invite list. That’s particularly funny, given it’ll be the telcos that actually deploy 5G – bit of an oversight that.

So they took down the ‘no telcos allowed’ sign from the club house and opened the door for Vodafone to come skipping in. The telco says it’s bringing something extra to the gang, given it has already started testing cellular vehicle to everything connectivity – ‘C-V2X’. It also reckons it is the world leader **shudder** in IoT connectivity because it provides more connected car services for more models from more manufacturers in more countries than any other company. Bit of a brag, that.

On top of this Vodafone also found the time to hold hands with Huawei over a lot of messing around with high and low frequency bands for dense urban city scenarios – claiming that to be in aid of 5G advancements. In keeping with any announcement of partnerships or trials and all that jazz, Huawei made a lot of claims about “firsts” and records and stuff like that.

“The communication between vehicles, infrastructure and pedestrians using C-V2X will be fundamental to the creation of intelligent transport systems,” said Vodafone’s Group head of R&D and tech strategy, Luke Ibbetson. “The technology that the 5GAA develops can lead to major improvements in driving and road safety.”

Huawei did, to be fair, claim some pretty hefty performance results from the field test, which used lots of technology cleverness like multi-user MIMO, Sparse Coding Multiple Access and Filtered-OFDM. Obviously you’d use MU-MIMO, SCMA and F-OFDM in a 5G trial, who wouldn’t? Anyway, Huawei says the trial managed a peak cell throughput of 18 Gbps under 200 MHz bandwidth in the sub-6 GHz band, while also achieving sub-millisecond latency.

In the words of Farmer Hoggett from farmyard movie classic Babe: “That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.”