Telefónica and Ericsson demo simultaneous 5G driving and streaming

Spanish telco group Telefónica got together with Ericsson and others to show how 5G will power the future car.

The novel part of this demo involved using 5G over the 3.5 GHz band to simultaneously control autonomous driving and content consumption. It used a EZ10 autonomous driving electric minibus supplied by EasyMile, containing an Ericsson 5G terminal and an infotainment platform from CarMedia.

On show was high data transfer capacity and ultra-low latency enabling the simultaneous streaming download of high-definition content; the creation of a work environment in the vehicle with virtual office applications and remote driving support based on the real time analysis and processing of the telemetry data sent by the autonomous vehicle.

“5G technology has much to contribute in the field of the connected vehicle,” said Javier Gutiérrez, Director of Strategy and Network Development at Telefónica Spain. “In addition to the download of multimedia content, autonomous vehicles generate up to 4TB of daily information from the information collected by the sensors, meaning that a high bandwidth is necessary for transferring this data in real time to the network’s edge and also an extremely low latency. All in order to jointly process the data received by the vehicles of a certain area and to proceed with decision making, thus increasing the security in vehicular environments.”

“By 2023, 20% of the world’s population will have 5G coverage,” said Jorge Navais, Commercial Director for the Telefonica account at Ericsson. “It will have an enormous 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 for the development of use cases like the one we present today. With this demonstration, we take a look at the future and how 5G will enable autonomous driving, only one example among many possibilities. It also poises Ericsson and Telefonica at the forefront of Spain’s journey towards 5G.”

This demo was part of a broader Telefónica initiative called the 5G Technological Cities project that aims to bring 5G goodness to Segovia and Talavera de la Reina (this one was in the latter). The official line is that they will become ‘5G living laboratories’, which seems in keeping with some of the stuff happening in Italy too. While this sort of thing provides a nice bit of publicity for all concerned, real world dress rehearsals are probably an important way of working out what we’re going to use new technologies for.