By Godson Umejiego, Correspondent USA

Autonomous and connected vehicle companies will benefit from a live environment in San Francisco, California, USA, to test the new Ericsson Routes service—at no cost—and provide direct feedback based on their needs.

Close up of dashboard illustrating autonomous vehicle connectivity

“Autonomous vehicles have the potential to drastically optimize traffic and reduce the number of incidents. With Ericsson Routes, developers of self-driving vehicles and related applications can leverage specific connectivity capabilities to create new solutions for the future of transportation together with Ericsson,” says Head of Business Area Technologies and New Businesses at Ericsson, Åsa Tamsons.

Autonomous vehicles rely on full-time connectivity for monitoring and exception handling and will continue to do so for a considerable time as the technical maturity of autonomous technology develops. Today, vehicles start their journey without certainty about the connectivity they will experience along the way, relying on either data from past trips or from crowd-sourced data sets which are disparate and sparse. This prevents these early-stage autonomous vehicles from acting efficiently in low-coverage areas.

Ericsson Routes changes this. It is like a ‘Waze’ for wireless cellular quality. It allows autonomous vehicles, drones, and other unmanned vehicles to go from A to B with the right wireless connectivity. Ericsson Routes provides a single integration point and a consistent prediction engine for autonomous vehicles across all their wireless service providers.

Ericsson Routes is now providing beta access to its Basic Service and will use real customer feedback to continuously improve its solution. The beta program is the first step in a journey that will see the Basic Service reaching commercial limited availability in April 2022. During the second half of 2022, Ericsson will launch the Premium Service in partnership with wireless service providers.

The Basic Service provides connectivity awareness along a path from point A to point B with its uplink blind spot detector (available with the beta program) and the uplink throughput prediction (available at the time of commercial limited availability).

The upcoming Ericsson Routes Premium Service, to be launched in partnership with wireless service providers, will provide a finer, real-time granularity that addresses critical connectivity requirements along the trip from point A to point B.

The beta program is first available in San Francisco, California, while the commercial limited availability release will expand the service to Houston, Texas. Additional markets may be added based on customer feedback. The Premium Service is expected to initially cover the same areas as the Basic Service plus Las Vegas, Nevada.

Cellular technology is the engine powering digital transformation. As a digital transformation partner for wireless service providers and car companies, Ericsson Routes is accelerating the arrival of autonomous vehicles and their benefits by providing real-time predictability for their connectivity needs.