We’ve written about the coming of self-driving cars before but this is a new angle – engineers say we’re going to need superfast mobile broadband to make it work properly. That's good, right?

The jury’s out on self-driving cars. For everyone who doesn’t want their freedom to be taken away there someone else who’s looking forward to making best use of their time while driving.

Hand in hand

There’s no doubt they are coming. Every major motor and component manufacturer, plus major tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Cisco and more, are pushing billions of dollars into autonomous vehicles (AV) research. They are also lobbying governments to change laws to allow AVs on our roads.

At the same time, there’s no doubt that 5G will be coming too. This is the next generation of mobile internet and even if AVs didn’t need it, consumer pressures will drive 5G to feed the data demands of the next generation of smartphones.

Now they are being brought together because of the need for AVs to communicate rapidly with road-side technology, the cloud and each other.

Communication needs

The 5G technology currently being tested has some problems when it comes to rolling it out over whole countries. The main one is that it uses higher frequency bands which have much shorter wavelengths.

This means they don’t travel anywhere near as far as 4G signals and aren’t as good at passing though objects like buildings and trees. The base stations are smaller and use les power but need to be within 200-300m of each other. In practical terms that means around 60 to 70 to cover the same area that one 4G base station covers right now.

Keeping in touch

The current crop of AVs are connecting across 4G networks for mapping and route data, much as current satnavs do. But experts are saying that self-driving cars will need to talk to each other as well. This is to avoid collisions, negotiate routes through junctions and to safely cruise in convoys, reducing congestion by allowing more cars to use the same stretch of road.

This means an agreed communications protocol between all the different manufacturers and tech companies fighting for control of the market. It also means a very fast network between cars and the cloud - hence 5G.

Do we really need 5G?

Some people involved don't think that 5G is absolutely necessary to enable AV. After all, the current AV trials going on around the world obviously don't use 5G, as it's not available. They get by with the 4G that the rest of us use, with some using WiFi too.

There's a school of thought that says if cars need to speak to each other then they can do that without having necessarily to connect back to the cloud or a central network. It's also true that, as any smartphone user knows, you can't always guarantee to be connected all the time.

So if AVs can't drive themselves safely when they aren't connected to a network, what will happen when they lose connection?

Interesting times ahead

This, like many other questions surrounding the coming of AVs will not have been overlooked by the thousands of people working around the world to make the dream a reality. One thing's certain - the next ten years will be very interesting for car drivers.

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