5G rollout began in Germany in mid-2019; the complexity of 5G antenna technology prevents satisfactory 5G network coverage before 2026

COOPERATIVE AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

This is an invaluable advantage, also with regard to road safety, as Vishnu Sundaram from Harman explains in a guest commentary [1] in ATZ. As Senior Vice President of the Telematics business unit of the Harman Automotive division, he understands the opportunities opened up by 5G in particular because of its very fast response time (latency) when compared with previous standards.

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED WITH EVERYTHING ELSE

  The objective of developers is to send a signal to a recipient within 1 ms. The possibilities that this offers are described by Deutsche Telekom using the example of an autonomous car that can evaluate data with a latency of 1 ms. It responds “1000 times more quickly than a person and therefore in a car traveling at 100 km/h can initiate a braking maneuver within a distance of less than 1 cm” [2]. This is a key requirement for applications such as truck platooning and the example illustrates what the 5G standard can achieve in ideal conditions.

  The fact that 5G has been designed for a large number of users – the 5G network can support up to one million devices per square kilometer without crashing – highlights the opportunities offered by 5G-based services for users and providers. An important factor for ensuring a high level of acceptance within the automotive industry is that 5G has standardized the guarantee of the QoS as an end-to-end connection for automotive applications.

Connectivity via WLANp for road traffic is already possible in EU countries at a low cost; it is not dependent on the development of the 5G mobile network

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT GUARANTEES THE SAFETY OF SERVICES

  The established 3G and 4G network technologies provide only best-effort services in the automotive field. This means that the network resources are assigned as uniformly as possible to participants in the cell, without prioritizing any users. “For our automotive applications this means that once the resources are ‘used up,’ we can no longer offer them or at least not temporarily,” explains Ahmad El Assaad from Volkswagen. He is an expert in the use of 5G for connected and autonomous driving and believes that the new advanced mobile network standard will resolve many problems.

  Service level agreements with mobile network operators will guarantee the QoS for networked services in vehicles using 5G. “As the mobile network cannot offer the same resources everywhere, 5G provides the functionality for predicting the QoS along the vehicle’s planned route,” says El Assaad. This requires the vehicle to share its route with the network, of course. Both the network slicing and the QoS are then standardized for the connection between the vehicle and the mobile network.

The speed at which data can be transmitted via 5G is fundamental to avoiding collisions

5G GIVES A BOOST TO GDP

Jörg Plechinger
Head of the Car2X & Mobile Connectivity Platform at Audi

2 QUESTIONS FOR …

Assessment of the relevance of 5G for the increase in expected revenues by industry (Survey | Source: BPI Network)

Disruptive changes expected from 5G by industry (Survey | Source: BPI Network)

VALIDATING FUNCTIONS WITH BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

  For competition reasons, none of the German automotive manufacturers we asked were prepared to reveal the actual revenue that they are expecting to earn on the basis of 5G or to give details of the lucrative business models that they will be introducing in the near future. There is a huge amount of competition around data-based business models, as a quick look at the US IT landscape indicates. The Alphabet subsidiary Waymo in particular, which is responsible for developing the systems for autonomous driving within the Google group, is one example. However, CEO John Krafcik emphasizes that “Waymo does not need 5G or 4G. Everything that we require is on board the car.”

  By contrast, other ideas rely on full 5G coverage. These include, among other things, the digital car wallets that will be integrated into vehicles in a pilot project run by Daimler and Porsche in collaboration with the start-up Riddle & Code. The companies involved regard 5G as a game-changer for future blockchain applications. But we have not yet reached that point. “While the mobile network is still being used simply as a data pipeline to transmit our encrypted data, we will not see any data-based business models,” says El Assaad. According to Volkswagen, these will only emerge on the 5G network when “we notify the network about data from the connected functions in the cars, for example as with network slicing, where we have to provide information about the position of our car and the types of applications as a minimum.”

OBSTACLES TO THE COMPREHENSIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF 5G

  The prediction of the QoS significantly increases the potential of data-based business models, because details of the current position and the route have to be given. “For this we first need to clarify the requirements of data protection legislation,” explains El Assaad and mentions that “this has a high priority.” Recent events on the semiconductor market are also causing concerns for developers. Increasing levels of connectivity call for highly specialized semiconductors, which are now in short supply for a number of different reasons, including the trade war between the US and China. Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi have been attempting to corner the market for some time.

  The role of the automotive industry and, in particular, that of German manufacturers in this game is very limited. This is demonstrated by the fact that Apple alone bought 53.6 billion US dollars worth of microprocessors for its iPhones, more than the entire global automotive industry, which spent only 50 billion US dollars. This is good news for Qualcomm. While the chip company has seen its revenues increase by 62 % over the previous year to around 8.2 billion US dollars because of the rapid expansion of 5G networks, German automotive manufacturers have been concerned about their production flows. These are the laws of the market economy in action.

PATENTS PUT PROGRESS AT RISK

  The merciless nature of progress is made clear by a recent report on the impact of telecommunication patents on the ability of the automotive industry to innovate which was published by the Center of Automotive Management and has been made available to the editorial team here. The author Prof. Stefan Bratzel was commissioned to carry out the study by Audi, BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen. In relation to connected vehicles “serious legal disputes have arisen between the automotive and telecoms industries concerning breaches of patents which are having a considerable impact on the established value creation structure of the automotive industry” [5].

  The problems predicted in the article entitled “Gefährliches Spiel mit dem Patentwesen?” (“A hazardous game with patents?”) [6] seem to be occurring as far back as 2014. This is because many of the patents that are granted represent “a declaration of bankruptcy with regard to the functioning of intellectual property rights.” In the mobile network systems required for autonomous driving a “ban on the use of individual components based on standard patents, for example in the current case of the mobile network modules, inevitably leads to sales coming to a halt and therefore a shutdown of production of the vehicle models affected, with serious economic consequences for the carmakers and their supply chain,” as Bratzel says.

Andreas Burkert

REFERENCES

[1] Sundaram, V.: 5G, the Car and the City. In: ATZworldwide 12/2020, p. 86
[2] Telekom (ed.): 5G-Geschwindigkeit ist Datenkommunikation in Echtzeit.
Online: https://www.telekom.com/de/konzern/details/5g-geschwindigkeit-istdatenkommunikation-in-echtzeit-544496, access: March 03, 2021
[3] Telekom (ed.): Einfach erklärt – Network Slicing. Online: https://www.telekom.com/de/konzern/details/network-slicing-485774, access: January 11, 2021
[4] McKinsey Global Institute: Discussion Paper: Connected World – An evolution in connectivity beyond the 5G revolution.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/connected-world-an-evolution-in-connectivity-beyond-the-5g-revolution, access: March 23, 2021
[5] Bratzel, S.: Auswirkungen von Patenten der Telekommunikation auf die Innovationsfähigkeit der Automobilindustrie. Gutachten, Center of Automotive Management, February 22, 2021
[6] Burkert, A.: Gefährliches Spiel mit dem Patentwesen? In: ATZ 116 (2014), No. 10, pp. 30-35

OPINION

"Data-driven business models will make much more of a mark on the automotive industry than the move to electric mobility ever could. It is understandable that none of the carmakers are prepared to say anything at this point about potentially lucrative business models. They are all concerned about foreign competition. What is less easy to understand is that there is no major IT company and no semiconductor industry in Germany that could compete with US and Chinese corporations in the field of communications technology, particularly given the importance of these industries for the mobility of tomorrow."

Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Andreas Burkert
is a correspondent with ATZ | MTZ | ATZelectronics.