Comment by kregasaurusrex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kregasaurusrex | Hacker News Reader

A nationalized 5G network will be essential for high-bandwidth applications like V2V across level 5 autonomous vehicles. As has been done in the past for large scale projects like GPS, LEDs, photovoltaics, and nuclear (just to name a few!) which private companies wouldn't be able to eat the long-term capex against. These technologies are also licensed either for free or very cheaply to companies in order to benefit the public at large since we've already paid for the R&D with tax dollars.

In order to prepare for the future of the digital economy at large, bandwidth shouldn't be an artificial limitation of it. Once all the associated RFCs for 5G are standardized, a rollout of this scale would most definitely pay for itself and more over the network's useful lifetime.

I expect that l5 autonomous vehicles will be able to function without any internet connection.

I'd be afraid if my car required cell service to function.

While there isn't an official RFC yet since the protocol is still in the RFP stages[0], the amount of new cars on the road will require roughly about the spectrum allocation as what's needed for cellphones right now. If we tried to cram all of this into existing 5GHz range of lower frequency spectrum, it's simply not enough. 5G has both a larger spectrum allocation and throughput of data available to it.

Edit: The cost of putting in a lidar system for your car won't be too expensive (probably <$1000 when done across a manufacturer's whole fleet); but think about having to pay for another cellular line on your phone bill at current telecom prices. It would be prohibitively expensive to the end users for mass deployment.

[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/readiness-of...

That ship sailed. V2V is a thing that will start showing up in 2023 in the US. It’s a mandate that is being accelerated by federal rule making as the gov was dissatisfied by the advancements being made.

The tech will eventually do things like communicate road conditions, allow lane prioritization, speed limits, etc, even for human driven cars.

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