T-Mobile’s partnership with remote-piloted driverless car service Halo took to the races at CES this month, where it served as the 5G-powered pace car during an autonomous racecar showdown.
The Halo car wasn’t competing itself but drove at speeds of up to 95 mph in warm up laps ahead of each round. The vehicle was piloted over T-Mobile’s Ultra Capacity 5G network, which includes mid-band 2.5 GHz spectrum.
RELATED: T-Mobile 5G powers Halo’s driverless car service in Las Vegas
Two autonomous racecars faced off at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the same city where Halo is already operating its service on the 5G network. Over the summer the partners said consumer riders would be able to request an electric driverless Halo vehicle to their doorstep with a push of a button. Once the car arrives, riders take over and manually drive to their desired destination. Then Halo takes itself back to the garage.
At the Indy Autonomous Challenge at CES T-Mobile’s 5G network supported real-time commands and a live video stream between the Halo car and a pilot who remotely navigated the vehicle around the track from a nearby building. Check out a video clip here.
In partnering with Halo for service in Las Vegas, T-Mobile equips multiple 5G modems within the vehicles that communicate with the 5G network and support in-car cameras. T-Mobile boasts the capacity and speeds of its mid-band network, which last year hit the milestone of 200 million people covered and now aims for 300 million.
Halo also is one of the startups that made its way through the 5G Open Innovation Lab, an effort co-founded by T-Mobile and other technology partners like Intel, Microsoft and VMware.
RELATED: Ericsson, Spirent join 5G Open Innovation Lab
For those interested in the autonomous racecar competition, Team PoliMove from Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Alabama won the grand prize while TUM Autonomous Motorsport from the Technische Universität München in Germany came in second.