Orange, Telefonica and partners create connected cars 5G highwayOrange, Telefonica and partners create connected cars 5G highway

The telcos are working with Orange's towers business Totem, European towers player Vantage, and the Saarland University of Applied Sciences, known as htw saar, to construct a 60 km 5G highway corridor between Metz in France and Saarbrücken in Germany.

The project will receive funding under the EU's Connecting Europe Facility Digital programme and also has the financial support of France's Grand Est Region.

The infrastructure the partners plan to build is designed to last for 10 years and the partners note that it goes well beyond national coverage obligations. It will enable the development of innovative mobile services linked to the connected vehicles market, such as cooperative lane changing, collision anticipation and prevention, and automatic traffic jam alerts. It will also support the testing of partially autonomous vehicles.

The bulk of the highway – 55 km – will be on French soil, where Orange and Totem will install nine new masts and upgrade up to eight to ensure dedicated 5G coverage using the 3.5 GHz spectrum band. On the German side, Telefonica and Vantage Towers will build up to five masts using a DAS system running at 3.6 GHz to provide coverage on the remaining 5 km.

The parties will start building imminently – early 2025, they say – and expect to have completed the work by the end of 2027.

That's not a moment too soon if analyst predictions on the connected car market prove accurate. By 2027 there will be 367 million connected cars on the roads, according to a prediction published by Juniper Research almost exactly two years ago.

A more recent data set, from Counterpoint Research and disseminated last spring, puts connected car sales at more than 500 million over the 2024-2030 period, half of which will have embedded 5G connectivity; in 2030, 90% of connected cars sold will have 5G, the analyst firm said,

Germany, currently the world leader in connectivity penetration, according to Counterpoint, will slip to fifth in the world by the end of the decade, accounting for 3.9% of unit sales. But that still makes it a sizeable market and the biggest in Europe.

"We are building a high-speed 5G highway to test how to provide consumers and companies with gigabit speeds in the best possible way while driving," said Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Enterprise Officer at O2 Telefónica. "This can be a major step towards making connected driving a reality in Germany."

He has a point. And given that connected vehicles are effectively useless without the actual networks that underpin them, projects like this one from Orange and Telefonica will only become more important as the market develops.

"This pioneering project will make this cross-border route the first in Europe to enable the use of connected vehicles and equipment," said Thierry Marigny, Director Orange Grand Est Region, Eastern France. "In future, users of this route will benefit from driver assistance services to enhance their comfort and safety in their connected vehicles."

This first cross-border route will doubtless not be the last.