Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. The big car makers are taking 5G (next gen) telecoms into a head-to-head with the US government’s homebred DSRC (WiFi based) technology. One, or perhaps even both of these, will define the future for connected vehicles in North America and globally. This makes for a high octane Internet of Things (IoT) race.
Caring which wins might seem more a question of political preference than a choice of ride – go with the open standard, or picnic on the back of the US national investment? But more human concerns fast appear. As at least one recent self-driving car accident has shown, the margins for error in this ‘smart’ auto space are still not small enough to win universal trust – not enough to make us uber confident, just yet.
Read blog post: “Nexus’ V2X PKI platform enable trust for connected and autonomous vehicles”
The fight around 5G cellular versus DSRC WiFi may well boil down to some spreadsheet discussion of deployment costs or investment sustainability, but some other specific markers raised in the article are well worth watching. Namely communications speed, safety, and even security at national level. Putting these into a couple of short stories the winner might well be the one that reduces automated braking distances at traffic lights from 1 metre to 2 centimetres (that’s a lifesaving saving); or, the winner might be the car maker that layers its safety and entertainment features across both technologies to best effect.
Driving the discussion to a whole new place, the US government has recently blocked corporate acquisition of a major silicon chip provider on the grounds that its extensive supply of IoT silicon to car makers could compromise national infrastructure security.
Whatever road this race takes, the starting grid will look very similar, every vehicle of the future will have one of these technologies onboard. For all of them secure communication begins with secure identity, and secure operations require efficient components. On the starting grid, and at the finishing line, these point to PKI technologies like Nexus Certificate Manager as clearly as a black and white chequered flag.
Read the whole article on Wall Street Journal here
Foto credit from Wall Street Journal: Toyota Motor and General Motors back a Wi-Fi-based technology known as DSRC for vehicle connectivity, while Ford Motor and BMW support fast-tracking fifth-generation cellular broadband. PHOTO: WILLY KURNIAWAN/REUTERS