Meet the car of the future: an LTE-enabled smartphone on wheels

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 05 November 2009 07:33

Business IT - Technology

Lucent and number of partners have produced a demonstration 'connected-car-of the-future' by integrating a number of state-of-the-art communications and other technologies into a single vehicle.

The vehicle, officially known as 'The LTE Connected Car' is a product of Alcatel-Lucent and several members of ngConnect, a multi-industry collaboration among network, device, application and content suppliers created by Alcatel-Lucent to develop pre-integrated examples of applications and services for 3G and 4G/LTE networks. Participants in the car project were Atlantic Records, QNX Software Systems, Toyota Motor Sales USA, chumby and Kabillion .

According to Dan Dodge, CEO of QNX, "our experience in the car has always been isolated from the rest of the world, and that is about to change. The car is going to become a first class citizen of the cloud in which inside the car you will have access to all the social media, all the network services that are out there. It will truly revolutionise the driving experience, the experience of the makers, the ecosystem of people who are going to make applications for those cars. It is probably the most exciting time in automotive history that I can imagine."

Alcatel-Lucent says it combined an LTE broadband radio link – which brings cloud-based multimedia services into the car – with an in-vehicle WiFi environment to support easy integration with traditional home-based services, and helped manage the integration of the car's wireless networks with the on-board operating system provided by QNX Software Systems.

Alcatel-Lucent also managed the end-to-end integration of the multimedia services available in the vehicle, including multiplayer video gaming and video on demand. According to Alcatel-Lucent, "The LTE Connected Car illustrates how 4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband access technology is poised to bring a host of new applications and services to the automobile that are not possible today with current wireless technologies."