Connectivity Technology Blog

This post provides a short introduction to what do we mean by Connected and Autonomous vehicles, which are often lumped together and referred to as CAVs. In very simple terms, a connected car has its own mobile cellular modem that can connect to the mobile network and create a wireless local area network which allows the car to share internet access and data with other devices inside and in some cases outside the car. Autonomous or self-driving cars on the other hand may not have connectivity available to them all the time. Regardless of the connectivity, they have to operate autonomously and depending on their surroundings, should reach their pre-programmed destination safely, along with any occupants. These vehicles use information from cameras, lidar and radar to create a 3D digital map of their surroundings and use this model to navigate. While autonomous vehicles should operate smoothly and safely even when they have no connectivity to the network, it will definitely help...

Air-to-Ground communications have been talked for a while. I first covered it back in 2015 while writing about a trial between Deutsche Telekom (DT), Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent (now part of Nokia). In fact Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) was a pioneer in this area which can be seen from this old whitepaper here . In fact this paper is translated as it is in the new Nokia library here . It wasn't at all surprising that yesterday, EE, part of BT Group, announced that it has signed an agreement with Nokia to build an industry-first nationwide 4G LTE Air-to-Ground network for the emergency services across Great Britain. According to the press release : The pioneering new 4G network will enable uninterrupted high speed broadband coverage for emergency service personnel working above ground from 500 feet up to 10,000 feet. As part of the agreement, EE and Nokia will enable mission-critical network coverage for emergency services that will be the world’s first use case utilising commerci...

I have covered Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on The 3G4G Blog here and looked at automated HetNet design which included FWA links here . I have also covered Wireline Wireless Convergence (WWC) as part of 5G and Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) posts. The links to the posts are available at the end. Back in December, Juniper took part in a Light Reading webinar which is being shared as part of this post. With revenues flat and traffic continuing to explode, the unsustainable state of network economics needs another disruption. The 5G deployment cycle offers an insertion opportunity for new converged architectures. Wireless offload solutions can re-route the traffic of data-hogging mobile subscribers over wireline cores built for bandwidth and performance rather than mobile cores (EPC) primarily designed for mobility and portability. The 5G Network Architecture in 3GPP Release-16 allows the convergence of fixed and wireless networks. This also allows many new opportunitie...

IBM, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), M1 Limited (M1) and Samsung recently announced Singapore’s first 5G Industry 4.0 trial, to demonstrate the transformative impact of 5G for enterprises and drive the next bound of Singapore’s digital economy. This announcement was part of IBM’s edge computing solutions for the 5G era announced at IBM Think 2020. A press release on the Singapore regulator IMDA's website said : The trial aims to develop insights and showcase benefits of 5G in Industry 4.01. It will be an innovation model that allows for development, testing and benchmarking of 5G-enabled solutions that can be applied across various industries. This partnership consists of the following three main areas: 5G Innovation : The trial aims to design, develop, test and benchmark 5G-enabled industry 4.0 solutions that can be applied across various industries. 5G Solution Showcase : Solutions developed will be featured at IBM’s Industry 4.0 Studio2 5G Solutions Show...