BARCELONA, Spain—AT&T and Vodafone Business aim to jump-start IoT connectivity in the automotive industry by bringing their respective areas of expertise together.
The companies said they will combine their expertise to develop superior and consistent connected-car solutions and experiences for customers across their combined footprints in North America, Europe and Africa.
In doing so, they are addressing a common challenge for automotive companies that want to sell solutions across countries. Each market has unique requirements and regulations, and working across multiple network operators and vendors gets complicated pretty fast.
The stated goal of AT&T and Vodafone Business is to simplify the deployment process, improve operations, deliver innovative solutions and make the network certification process easier.
The companies said they will prioritize projects to enhance safety, security and entertainment capabilities with these key areas of focus:
- 5G and autonomous vehicle technology
- Vehicle-to-everything capabilities
- In-vehicle entertainment
- Connected car applications and services
- Global service quality models
- Connected car/smart cities intersection
AT&T and Vodafone currently support bilateral roaming on their respective networks for both automotive and general IoT solutions, according to an AT&T spokesperson. AT&T and Vodafone have also launched LTE-M roaming across a few markets and will continue to expand roaming capabilities in the future, the spokesperson told FierceWirelessTech.
Collectively, the companies work with nearly 50 global automotive brands and connect more than 43 million cars and trucks on the road today.
AT&T and Vodafone are both board members of the 5GAA, where automotive, technology and telecom companies are working to develop end-to-end solutions for future vehicular mobility and transportation services.
Vodafone also has been testing Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) in Germany for the past two years, integrating C-V2X with adaptive cruise control, a driver assistance system that warns the driver about something happening on the road and automatically accelerating or braking in response.