300 Gigabytes of data per month per car is what Cisco Systems projects when connected and autonomous vehicles.fill the roadways. Speaking at the TIA’s Connected Car Workshop and in the above interview at that event, Andreas Mai, Director of Smart Connected Vehicles for Cisco Systems, discusses the impact that this much connectivity will have on infrastructure, as well as the more nuanced aspects of data ownership.
He suggests a heterogeneous network infrastructure, that could include a combination of private and public infrastructure, will be required to create reliable connectivity and could include a mix of LTE, WiFi, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and, sometimes, satellite. Interestingly, 300 Gigabytes is greater than what some ISPs provide today as a monthly allotment for wired networks.
Latency is critical for the safety aspect of connected vehicles and the solution he suggests is processing near the network ingress/egress points; what Cisco calls Fog or cloud-like capability very close to the client (or vehicle, in this case). Implicit in delivering the kind of bandwidth that Mai suggests will be needed, will be a robust fiber backbone infrastructure.
Of course, security and ownership of data is a big issue today with regards to cloud applications. He points out that, to achieve the biggest societal benefit, it may make sense to treat at least some of the connected vehicle data as a public good (e.g. car braking). Of course, there is some information, such as route information, that would have to be kept as private or, if shared, done so in an anonymous manner.
These are the type of questions that need to be addressed and, as was suggested at the conference, perhaps ethicists need to be regular panelists at these sort of discussions.
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