With the upgrade of telecommunication technologies, vehicles are bound to evolve toward connectivity scenarios that will enhance our lives, not just in terms of traffic safety but also how cities are re-imagined into urban centers that will improve the lives of citizens, our daily activities, and the flow of life, work, and play.
The Mobile Revolution
Cars were fitted with telephones ever since 1956. These could handle calls without the need for an operator to direct the call but were not truly “mobile.” They were dependent on a specific telephone mast that acted as a base-station which was only able to handle communications within a very reduced geofence.1 In order to offer communications not bound by geography, the first generation of mobile networks was an analogue technology developed in the 1980s. Various technologies were deployed according to each country or region: NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone) for the Scandinavian European countries, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe and Russia; AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) developed by Bell Labs and Motorola for North America and Australia; TACS (Total Access Communication System) in the United Kingdom; A-Netz to E-Netz in West Germany, Portugal and South Africa; Radiocom 2000 in France; TMA in Spain; and RTMI (Radio Telefono Mobile Integrato) in Italy. In Japan, a country that led the early mobile innovations, each of the telecommunication companies launched their own standards. JTACS (Japan Total Access Communications System) by Daini Denden Planning, Inc. (DDI) and the TZ-80n series by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation).2 What these 1G networks were able to achieve was one of the most important pillars of mobile communications: roaming , that is, the ability to place calls to a mobile telephone within a network, irrespective of its geographical location. The second generation brought to market the first digital systems, deployed in the 1990s introducing voice, SMS, and data services. The primary 2G technologies were GSM/GPRS & EDGE, CDMAOne, PDC, iDEN, IS-136 or D_AMPS. Unfortunately, the telecom operators at the time did not see much business in the data side of the mobile industry. It took almost two years for Vodafone in the United Kingdom to create a pricing platform for their text SMS services,3 for example. Data was still a feature of a mobile network, but not a major earner. In 1994 GPRS (General Packed Radio Service) began to be developed into a standard by the Special Mobile Group (SMG) within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). GPRS was coming to GSM infrastructure to provide reusable end-to-end packet-switched services, thus not demanding the networks to be upgraded. Three years later, GPRS specifications were approved and by 1999 it was a service that was ready to be commercialized. GPRS could run data downstream speeds of between 56 to 114 kilobytes per second. At the time, this speed was only good enough for basic WAP portals, like Yahoo! News and to download your emails to your phone, but not to deliver image-heavy websites, let alone what some mobile operators claimed as “surfing the web on your mobile phone,” a marketing claim that was very far from the true user experience. Although throughout the early 2000s many WAP developers threw themselves to the task of creating incredible gaming and e-commerce WAP sites, the whole ecosystem collapsed because of a series of unfortunate circumstances: WAP made the wireless transport layer security vulnerable, and claimed to support all wireless networks, even those of Motorola’s FLEX and ReFLEX networks, which were created to run pagers and text messages communications, but had never been designed for Internet protocol applications. WAP was over-hyped and the cellular networks did not see how they could recover their investment in upgrading the networks to faster speeds of 2.5G or 3G. Then, by hook or by crook, and very much by a certain obsessive dreamer of tech called Steve Jobs, a handset called iPhone ignited the hearts of every single consumer in North American and Western Europe in 2007. By then, the networks were stable and run 3G data speeds good enough to deliver the smartphones’ promise of streaming music, Internet anywhere, and push emails. And with Bluetooth, a radio frequency for nearby objects, the Internet was finally mobile. The issue then was to handle the increasingly large amount of cell phones and other devices connected to it concurrently, downloading stuff at 2Mbps (megabytes per second). On December 14, 2009, Scandinavian network operator Telia-Sonera launched the first commercial 4G network in the capitals of Sweden and Norway – Stockholm and Oslo – and a year later other European countries began to upgrade their 3G networks to either 4G or what was called 4G Long-Term-Evolution (LTE), a bit slower than true 4G. The difference between 3G and 4G networks was radical. While speeds in 3G networks were achieving kilobytes per second, 4G brought with it something supersonic: megabytes of data speed, achieving downstreams of up to 5Mbps, a speed comparable to what one gets at home via a cable modem or Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) of a telephone network.4
Mobile life skyrocketed to infinity and beyond with 4G and LTE. Still, there are great differences between each other where it comes to the standards assigned to each by the International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunications Sector (ITU-R). Whereas the consumer was awarded 4G speeds spectrums of up to 1Gbit per second, for connections considered for pedestrian or stationary “low mobility” contexts, and vehicles were awarded just 1Mbytes/second for “high mobility” needs, the crude reality was that network operators never delivered these speeds in real terms, and LTE was just marginally faster than 3G in some countries. This is why with 5G, the ante stakes will go much higher and will set the mobile experience worlds apart from previous network generations.
Cellular networks became faster because telecommunications companies upgraded their signaling towers. Where a 3G tower could offer a stable and fast signal to about 60 to 100 cell users, a 4G tower could do the same but for 300 to 400 people concurrently. But here is where the line between them and 5G is drawn because 5G is just another crazy level of everything. Spectrum-wise, while both 3G and 4G can easily operate within the low-and-mid bandwidths that range between 600 Megahertz and 6 Gigahertz, 5G takes off and flies solo all the way up to its unique 100 Gigahertz capability. What does this mean in real terms? It means that it can handle every connected device, not just mobiles, tablets, automobiles, and the 2010s Internet of Things, but also the Internet of Everything: connected vehicles, connected homes, and all that there is in connected cities. The digitally linked society of the future that many of us dreamed of finally found its Godspeed. The decade that we are just entering is one where telecommunications companies will still offer every generation of networks, from 1G to the newly minted 5G and beyond. This is because society will require different spectrums for different connectivity needs. Lower spectrum bandwidths like 2G and 3G are more reliable and their signal is powerful enough to penetrate buildings. This is why when your 4G signal fails in the elevator, your phone automatically switches to 3G. It is therefore the preferred signal for edge computing, the new universe of connected devices within a closely knit location. In this realm, the Internet of Sensors, artificial intelligence inferences are performed right on the edge, without uploading all the data to the Cloud. The way Cloud and Edge become environments for AI is based on when we train algorithms and when we put them to work with live data. We train algorithms in the Cloud, where enormous volumes of data help us ensure that machine intelligence does comprehend what we are teaching it, and the algorithms perform with zero-error, delivering non-bias results. Once these algorithms are confirmed and trained, they are embedded into Edge devices such as mobile phones, tablets, low computational software systems, and cars. In the Edge realm, the data that they handle is live data, and in much less quantities. This is why, being able to perform algorithmic functions within this dual scenario – local edge for fast, real-time applications, and uploaded to the Cloud for algorithm training – is how automobiles became extraordinarily intelligent machines.
Intelligent Vehicles
5G cars are, in real terms, computers with wheels. They come to market with an intelligent system ready to make decisions in real time. How this works out is very simple: the car’s AI system will have a baseline knowledge of what it is supposed to perform acquired via machine learning training – which takes an awful long time to get right. This trained model is embedded into the car’s system and once it starts to interact with the real world, it will make decisions based on inference, that is, predicting events based on new data inputs, and how it was trained to think. This allows for decisions that are easy to turn around and is ideal for applications such as computer vision, voice recognition, and language processing tasks, the baselines of the car of the future. A great example of this is the current safety measures in high-end car models deployed to ensure a driver’s correct handling of the vehicle. The car is fitted with a camera sensor that keeps track of the road markings and will detect if the driver is steering erratically – perhaps from tiredness, or worse, a drunken stupor. At this point the system will infer that the driver must be alerted and will make the steering wheel vibrate or sound an alarm, whereas it will do nothing if the lane separation marks are crossed over when overtaking another vehicle. How will it know the difference? The driver uses the blinkers before maneuvering, or any other action built into the training model to signify that drivers are in control of their actions or following normal protocols. A car’s headlights go on when entering a dark car park, or when dusk turns into night; high beam lights are switched to normal nighttime lights if an oncoming vehicle appears in our horizon in order to avoid blinding the other driver. All of these automated behaviors have been trained at factory level and the car, a computer on the edge of the network, performs them in real-time within milliseconds.
Before cars are able to be fully autonomous, there is a step in between our current vehicles and what the automotive industry is planning to offer: it is called the “connected car,” a vehicle that connects to other vehicles, devices, and infrastructure. The automotive industry has been working on this for decades and via a multitude of approaches. A portfolio of technologies has been tested, proposed, and implemented, presenting such an array of possibilities that manufacturers have had the opportunity to pick and choose to create co-development alliances with different technology providers. In reality, all of them constitute “moonshots” at solving the safety issues around driving and managing traffic. Some are more scalable and less costly than others, but all aim at potentially working out in parallel, as additional layers of innovation. In the last twenty years the boiling pot of connected car innovation has prompted some very interesting technologies worth considering, but nothing will compare to what vehicle connectivity communications will bring in terms of game-changing scenarios.
The Internet of Vehicles
Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) , a one-way and two-way wireless communication specifically designed for automotives, was developed in the late 1990s and meant to be used by intelligent transportation systems (ITS) . Initially, the main purpose of ITS was to become a preventative measure to decrease the number of traffic accidents which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) causes about 1.2 million deaths and about 50 million of injured-for-life people a year worldwide. This data puts driving accidents in third place among all causes of mortality in 2020, a whopping increase from the 9th position that vehicle deaths used to cause in 1990, when we drove cars that were less fitted with safety measures. As car ownership became more accessible, so did the number of vehicles, which in just three decades has grown to account for 1 billion of passenger vehicles worldwide, according to the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA). Still, safety is one of the oldest mantras in the automotive industry and what keeps its legality and positive relations with governments, so the pressure to decrease accidents is of utmost importance.
Vehicles fitted with DSRC would broadcast their location and identify themselves individually to a monitoring system. One can use them to electronically collect fees in toll roads, or manage the flow and schedules of public transport. DSRC can even synchronize the individual cruise controls of a fleet of vehicles via what is known as the Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), which realizes the distance between the vehicle in front of yours and synchronizes the cruise speed accordingly. These type of vehicular communication systems form computer networks in which vehicles and sensor-based nodes along the roads communicate with each other, providing safety warnings and traffic information. In addition to speed and direction, DSRC can also give vehicle localization by a centimeter-base. If an accident occurs, ambulances can be dispatched instantly to the exact location and traffic can be diverted to other routes before they pile-up the area, jamming the roads and preventing medical aid to reach people in need. Cars can send each other warnings as to when to brake unexpectedly before the driver has a visual aid to do so. DSRC seemed to have a splendorous track toward adoption. ABI Research was predicting in 2014 that, by 2018, 10% of worldwide shipped vehicles would be fitted with DSRC and a 70% adoption share by 2027, until the telecommunications companies asked to share the 5.9 GHz band for connecting services that they planned to launch. After initial power-wrestling in the boardrooms of both car manufacturers and telecom companies, the spectrums were agreed on the understanding that together they could gain more rather than fighting each other at regulator’s offices, the path toward 5G services was cleared.
5G: The Internet Superhighway
Connectivity is a crucial milestone in vehicles’ evolution toward digital transformation because it offers a wide range of possibilities. Even within current 4G networks, cars have connected to each other (Vehicle-2-Vehicle, V2V) in order to map out road traffic, and to infrastructure (Vehicle-2-Infrastructure, V2I) in emerging edge computing scenarios based on the Internet of Things . But with 5G, the landscape will upgrade to superior levels of automation. Concepts such as “automated parking” whereby, upon entry into a smart parking building, your car will be “taken over” by an automated valet system which will find an available spot for your vehicle, drive to it, and park it – all of this while you are sitting at the steering wheel comfortably checking your WhatsApp, returning emails, or applying lipstick. This will allow drivers to get accustomed to completely letting go of their car, thus breaking the ice toward complete trust in an independent machine at speed. The Vehicle-2-Infrastructure (V2I) landscape will open to relevant IoT services that will digitally shape localities into becoming intelligent towns (smart cities of automated self-management). Vehicles will calculate speeds according to traffic lights switching, send signals to pedestrians to announce their nearby presence and prevent accidents (Vehicle-2-Pedestrian) as well as connect to the network (V2N) in order to plan more efficient routes in real-time, establish less polluted itineraries, and route through safer and slower streets that the elderly drivers will handle better. In the 5G environment, the digital reality will be one of a connected to everything vehicle, or Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-2VX). Connected not just to each other but also to everything around them, vehicles will navigate a virtual reality of 360 degrees’ self-awareness, functioning within two and three-dimensional realities as well as predicting future eventualities, reacting before they happen. The road safety of the future will upgrade to a new dimension with 5G networks, paving the way to the future of autonomous driving.5
Creating the necessary infrastructure to support this vision has required enormous OEM programs among telecom operators and infrastructure providers. The 5GAA (5G Automotive Association) aggregates eight of the nine global automakers, nine of the top ten global telecommunications companies, as well as top automotive suppliers, smartphone manufacturers, semiconductor and wireless infrastructure companies, and test and measurement companies and the pertinent certification entities. It is an ecosystem of ecosystems working in alliance to develop solutions for intelligent transportation, mobility services and smart cities in the 5G 2020 decade. It is also an integrated and coordinated approach to roll out autonomous driving, define and agree upon standards, test prototypes within well-defined scenarios, and get ready for initial deployments around the world. Founded as early as 2016, the 5GAA has adopted a clever approach to working with regional standards6 to define applications on a global scale. Creating a proven know-how library of case studies, different tests and OEM demonstrations were first deployed in Europe in 2017, and in the United States and China in 2018, having gained incredible traction before Covid-19 took over the world in the spring of 2020. One of the most crucial objectives was to create interoperability among the automakers, so that any vehicle could benefit from new use cases developed across the regions and defining application layer-specific minimum requirements for new messages between cars and infrastructure. The longer term expansion of the roadmap envisions developing toward industrial IoT, enterprise and automotive networks, private networks, and even environments of unlicensed spectrum from 2023 onward. The most important element to always bear in mind is that we are creating telecommunications between objects that move at high speeds. This is a challenge that goes beyond the static nature of traditional telecommunications and a requirement that demands safety at all times as well as versatility of interactions (V2V, V2I, V2P), guaranteeing latency performance and deploying higher spectral efficiency at speed. Basically, a five-ring circus of real-time multi-signaling, with the added pressure of handling people’s lives inside fast moving vehicles.
To put these advances in automotive and telecommunications into an economic perspective, the automotive V2X market is estimated to be worth around US$ 689 million in 2020 and projected to reach US$ 12,859 million by 2028, at a CAGR of 44.2%,7 of which the Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) segment will be the one with the fastest and most explosive growth within the V2X market, currently led by major players such as Robert Bosch GMBH (Germany), Continental AG (Germany), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (United States), Autotalks Ltd. (Israel), and Delphi Technologies (United Kingdom). Governments and regulators have played their part in enabling the growth and attractiveness of this sector by allocating specific spectrums to DSRCs. While in Europe the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) allocated 30 MHz of spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band, in the United States the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doubled the allocation to 75 MHz of spectrum in the same GHz band, signaling how bullish the government is in capitalizing this new emerging technology, pushing the US vendors to be as competitive as possible over the European ones. According to a report by Industry Analytics Research Consulting8 [quote] “the overall market of DSRC On-board units and roadside units in the year 2017 amounted to be $100.6m. Also, the global DSRC market for passenger vehicles was estimated to be $60.7m in the same year and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 6.8% for the forecast period.” [end quote]. According to this report, the determining powers of influence of this sector, in addition to government support and encouraging regulations, will be the increased awareness for safety measures that the deployment of DSRCs will bring to drivers, an augmented reality in which vehicles will “communicate” to other vehicles and infrastructures, even under extreme weather conditions. This short range of communications increases the safety features beyond what the human eye and capacity for driver’s reactions were able to achieve in twentieth-century vehicles, making “Vehicle Awareness” the cornerstone of future autonomous driving and the requirement that smart cities and municipalities want to see operating on their roads before they allow for fully automated, autonomous traffic.
The infrastructure for these short-range communications requires not just the on-board units (OBUs) of each car, something that the vehicle manufacturers have been working on for years, but roadside units (RSUs), which each municipality must install as part of the public infrastructure. Whereas in vehicle-to-vehicle communications RSUs were not needed, this part of the equation, the allocation of public funds or private contracts to ITC vendors to build RSU infrastructure will determine which cities take off in testing autonomous vehicles and which ones will lag behind. Moreover, the potentiality of certain urban centers to become “intelligent cities”9 will leverage DSRC infrastructure to increase public safety and traffic management beyond what can be achieved today. Dangerous circumstances such as not spotting blind spots while driving will be solved thanks to DSRC technologies. Drivers will be warned for forward collisions caused by the sudden braking of drivers ahead, or unexpected vehicles crossing intersections. Vehicles digitized with DSRC will be inspected for safety with less room for error, detected by emergency vehicles on a map for exact location, and become, in the next five years, integral parts of the Edge computing context of the future of life, work, and play. Gartner has taken the Cassandra side of this argument and predicted a doom and gloom 2023 future in which “30% of smart city projects will be discontinued” for being too techie, too keen on displaying emerging technologies that serve very little real purposes and are mostly a show-off of technology vendors, as it has happened in city projects that forced municipalities to enter into smart city deployments that were technologically achievable but failed to derive any citizen benefit. Welcome to a project that I was part of in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, just when the municipality was preparing to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Two technology giants, and allow me to not mention any names, convinced the city police department to create a crowd monitoring system that would spot crime on the streets in real-time, allowing the authorities to prevent potential muggings, arrest perpetrators and other law enforcement activities that would benefit from video camera footage. The project was successful. There, in the mission control room at the Rio Operations Center (COR), a combined effort between the Center for Integrated Command and Control (CICC), and the Army to coordinate the security operations, a multitude of TV screens showed us strategic shots of city intersections, accesses to metro stations and the Olympic stadium. And right there, via live feed, we could see all kinds of law infractions, so many that the police department could not handle a fraction of them, to the frustration of the authorities that felt shamed by a technological platform for not having enough law enforcement officers on the streets. What Gartner is pointing out is that human centricity needs to be put on the agenda whenever a smart city is being envisioned, and that the involvement of municipalities in technology projects has to ensure the direct benefits to the city dwellers.
Edge Computing Mobility
There is an additional layer of value in the 5G network proposition, something that makes a 5G network become another connectivity dimension: user plane latency for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), that is, the ability to successfully deliver an application layer packet/message from the radio protocol L2/L3 service data unit (SDU) entering point to the radio protocol L2/L3 SDU entering point via the radio interface in both uplink and downlink directions. In this context, neither device nor base station reception is restricted by discontinuous reception (DRX). In plain English, what this new low latency transport layer of communications means is the ability of a packet-data network connecting IoT devices to provide, without disruptions, a constant transmission in both downstream and upstream. This assures that all services within a 5G Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) network are transmitted successfully, in real-time, and end-to-end without delays, a fundamental service delivery for critical applications, especially those involving vehicles at speed. This fifth generation of mobile communication systems promises to off-load onto Edge tasks which require applications to stick to strict latency requirements and, you guessed it, it uses artificial intelligence algorithms in order to partition tasks into sub-tasks, offloading them to multiple nearby edge nodes (ENs), just like electrical grids self-manage their networks to ensure that electricity is always available. The 5G ecosystem will not only perform for the automotive industry and its autonomous vehicles but to an ecosystem of other tasks that range from smart factories, remote surgery at smart hospitals, and other real-time control of cyber physical systems in a real or virtual environment. In the next ten years, the concept of “smart” or “intelligent” will encompass much more than cities: it will signify that many components of manufacturing and machine tasks will be automated with safety and reliability. In addition to ultra-reliable low latency communications, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)10 has additionally classified the fifth-generation 5G spectrum into enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC), which denotes the substantial upgrade to network design and architecture that 5G will derive to the ITC industries and the increase of time-critical tasks that 5G networks will be mandated to deliver in a world completely digitized and dependent on it for substantial societal activities. To put this into perspective, current 4G networks are merely delivering telephony, social media communications, the Internet, and the exponential rise of digital media streaming. This is the current heavy-lifting. With 5G networks, High-Resolution Imaging, the Internet of Things, Cloud and Edge services and autonomous vehicles will be added to the list, representing an exponential escalation of data communications and latency requirements that will not only require milliseconds – as in the case of Virtual Reality services – but also high performance computation on a permanent, always-on basis. Moreover, this world of massive interconnectivity and communications will require that energy saving solutions are built into the 5G networks in order to optimize power consumption in machine-to-machine communications (M2M). As the rise in telecommunications exponentially increases, so will the need to upgrade existing energy resources and performance. The future, and it is more and more clearly outlined each day as we progress in ITC, will be heavily influenced by our ability to store and manage electricity. Whichever burdens formerly kept telecommunications growing at linear speed, constantly but in manageable ways, 5G networks will help the ITC sector achieve its highest potentiality, igniting as a result in an unprecedented need to innovate the energy sector.
Currently, 5G deployment around the world begins to unfold the birth of super-fast digital hubs in major cities and some early-adopter mobile phone users are beginning to switch to 5G-enabled mobile phones. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of these fast connectivity hubs is getting entangled in geopolitics, with the banning of Huawei technology in one third of the world’s GDP according to Bloomberg. As of December 12, 2019, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States decided to break their contracts with the Chinese manufacturer of mobiles and network technologies, phasing out the company’s products within their mobile networks. In the United Kingdom, against contracts that the Cameron government had previously signed off with Huawei, the current Johnson government reduced their involvement in British 5G networks to just 35% from the majority stake that had been originally agreed. The reasons alleged for this ban point toward the threat of illegal espionage on the part of the Chinese government, who could use backdoors within the Huawei technology to have access to foreign countries’ data. At the end of 2020, the majority of the world countries remain on the fence with regards to continuing with their Huawei contracts as more evidence surfaces regarding any trespasses of national security. So far, and to the dismay and annoyance of the Trump administration, nothing concrete or potentially demonstrable in a court of Law regarding government espionage has been found out against Huawei or the Chinese government. Still, the pressure imposed by the United States in some countries has created a divide between national decisions and private sector attitudes favoring to remain neutral. Certain telecom operators have decided to choose other network vendors as a partner for their 5G networks (in July 2020 Telecom Italia excluded Huawei from a tender for 5G equipment for the core network it is preparing to build in Brazil and Italy; in Belgium, both Orange and Proximus chose Nokia this past October 2020), whereas in recent days others have even challenged their own governments of restricting free competition and trade, a claim disclosed by the CEO Ericsson of Sweden in an interview with the Financial Times.11 In addition to these national security and trade concerns, the Huawei ban will have serious consequences on the costs of building 5G networks. On June 7, 2019, Reuters reported that in Europe, the ban of Huawei equipment would increase the costs of building the European Union 5G network to an extra 55 billion Euros (US$ 65 billion) and delay the technology by about 18 months, something that European telecom lobbies are beginning ascribe to put pressure on their governments’ national security concerns and use the values of commercial innovation as a winning argument. A year later, the European Union has taken a calculated approach to the problem, since EU countries have competitive 5G mobile technologies from Sweden’s Ericsson, and Finland’s Nokia as well as South Korea’s Samsung, and thus, has remained neutral in its directives. Both France and Germany, though not directly or explicitly banning Huawei technologies from 4G and 5G networks, have concluded to tighten their security measures and facilitate that other vendors are offered parts of the networks’ servicing, making it harder for Huawei to remain with any foothold in their countries over time. How does a political crisis come to affect the private sector and how can governments remain in agreement on trade and military alliances such as NATO? An example of this is how Norway is responding to this tricky situation: whereas the Norwegian government has explicitly expressed their refusal to block Huawei from building the country’s 5G telecoms network, increasing NATO’s internal concerns, Telenor, Norway’s state-controlled telecommunications company, has picked up Sweden’s Ericsson as their key technology provider for their 5G network, forcing Huawei out of their infrastructure after a decade of servicing.12
Espionage and manipulation of other countries’ data is a daily activity performed by intelligence agencies at the request of their government. Let us be clear on history and de-emphasize the current finger-pointing toward China. The United States and Russia have their fair share of espionage conundrums that range from the NSA tapping of prime ministers’ telephones in developed countries to the mangling of US presidential elections in 2016 via social media fake news. Perhaps, the only way to resolve the current situation is to force diplomatic relations to measure the pros and cons of sustaining a global ban and mistrust of Chinese technologies in order to encourage world governments to vouch for transparency, cooperation, and de-escalation of national sovereignty. Diplomacy and international relations have worked out to deliver the highest benefit to humanity in Cold War endeavors such as the space industry, where the space agencies had fought hard to fence off government pressures that forbade collaboration and trust with other nations. Progress in the 2020 decade, as a benefit to social welfare, must derive from each government’s peace and collaboration efforts with other nations. 5G and its ecosystem of connected services are a milestone in humanity’s efforts toward the creation of a better-off society, a safer world, and, hopefully, a more entwined civilization that will learn to control its politician’s egos and personal affairs tighter, encouraging a governance of higher vision and hopes for human evolution.
Summary
According to analysts, 2021 is the year in which smart city projects, of which connected vehicles are a fundamental component, will start rendering true value to municipalities and the people living within them. The notion that a vehicle is today a connected computerized system is a reality, and this is even before it begins to self-drive. Telecommunication infrastructure has derived one of the biggest socio-economic benefits to humanity, not just directly in terms of allowing us to reach out to each other better and faster but by creating prosperity in economic and societal fronts. Now that the networks can offer a wide range of connectivity spectrums, the splendor of the Internet of Things, of Edge-computed devices, and intelligent transportation and traffic management are technologies that will exponentially grow to transform and optimize sectors such as healthcare, supply of goods to cities, road safety, and the flourishing of inner city communities.