The agile telco must see telematics in the vehicle industry as a key opportunity for its services. Antony Savvas looks at what sort of opportunities there actually are.
Luxury cars should be an obvious opening for what the agile telco can provide, and BMW is proving it. Verizon Business in the US and Japan’s KDDI are now supplying a joint connected vehicle offering to BMW Group, including Verizon’s 5G and LTE networks, and KDDI’s Global Communications Platform.
Verizon is providing telematics connectivity for new BMW, MINI and other BMW Group vehicles manufactured for the US market, enabling the BMW ConnectedDrive platform, digital infotainment, apps, and other telematics services. These vehicles are the first to be connected to Verizon’s nationwide 5G Standalone for Connected Vehicles offering.
“Our collaboration with BMW Group and KDDI prioritises innovation and capability to advance the connected experience for drivers across the US,” says Kyle Malady, the chief executive of Verizon Business.
The initiative stems from Verizon’s long-standing relationship with KDDI, which provides IoT services through its Global Communications Platform to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). KDDI’s platform enables a programmable connected experience for BMW Group, giving the automaker “complete control” of the connectivity and data packets flowing through Verizon’s network.
“We understand the critical importance of performance and reliability, and together with BMW Group and Verizon we are committed to delivering an exceptional connected driving experience to customers across North America,” said Satoshi Oishi, the president and chief executive of KDDI America.
Fleets
Lithuania’s Wialon, the global fleet telematics and IoT software platform, and Teltonika, the GPS device manufacturer, are now jointly helping keep one million trucks, vans and other vehicles on the road globally, covering a combined 67 million kilometres every day – more than the total length of all roads on Earth, including unpaved routes, says Wialon.
That daily distance requires roughly 10 million litres of fuel. However, smart fleet telematics is said to help reduce unnecessary mileage and idling by an average of 10%, translating to a saving of around one million litres of fuel, and 2,500 tonnes of CO₂ emissions every single day, an amount of carbon that would take 100,000 mature trees an entire year to absorb, say the partners.
While the Wialon/Teltonika alliance is impressive, it actually only represents a quarter of Wialon’s business. Over 2,700 channel partners use Wialon to track and manage more than 4m vehicles in over 160 countries. Teltonika itself has offices in 27 countries, and more than 10,000 channel partners of its own.
“Wialon is a hardware-agnostic software platform, which means it doesn’t lock partners into specific devices. Instead, it supports more than 4,100 models from over 700 manufacturers, giving service providers and fleet owners the freedom to choose the hardware that best fits their projects,” says Aliaksandr Kuushynau, the head of Wialon.
Formula 1
Agile Telco has toured the recently launched Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team‘s new £200m factory and HQ across the road from the Silverstone race circuit. This happened just before the start of the British Grand Prix in July.
It was a hive of activity as you can imagine, and the IoT stats were staggering. We were told 50 billion sensor data points are captured per car per race weekend. Data from every sensor in the car is continuously processed through calculations to create new channels, which themselves are then processed multiple times in multiple locations to give more specific information on the car. In total, this means the team can be processing up to 450 million data points per second.
Each lap generates around 60MB of car data and an additional 120MB processed in the garage, totalling 180MB per lap per car. Between 50 and 100 real time decisions are made lap by lap based on live race data.
Going into a race weekend, the team could be looking back over four years of previous car data and simulations to inform on the car’s configuration. At a given moment, the team could be considering 40 to 50 different set-up parameters as options to change and improve the car. On top of this, the control systems can have 4,000 to 5,000 parameters being tweaked to try and get the best out of the car. Ahead of a race weekend, up to 100,000 race scenarios are run, to look at the probability of a result and use that to define the race strategy.
To cap it all, the average Formula 1 engine control unit (ECU) performs 43 trillion calculations per race. All this telemetry and simulation has to be supported by key technology partners, which were rolled out at the launch of the team’s new Aston Martin Racing (AMR) Network at the British Grand Prix. Instead of just taking their sponsorship cash, the team reckons it can get its collection of partners to truly work together to help improve the team’s performance, as well as generate new business for each other in the areas of artificial intelligence and advanced computing.
Senior executives from the likes of CoreWeave, Zscaler, Cohere, ServiceNow, Cognizant, Cognition, NetApp, Xerox and Arm were in attendance, to take part in panels and media round-tables to discuss the growing role of machine learning, AI and high-performance computing in not only F1, but business in general.
Jefferson Slack, managing director, commercial, Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, told us: “The AMR Network enables us to continue conversations throughout the season, creating meaningful opportunities for collaboration and thought leadership across our partner portfolio. We now have a critical mass of partners, and what we’ve discovered is that these partners can come together and do business together, not just help us to go faster and win.”
With all that data sloshing around everywhere, Agile Telco asked who was the communications service provider transporting it. We were told one of the existing partners was responsible for providing the right network, but there is certainly still room on the car to carry the name of a distinguishable comms provider.
Antony Savvas