€8m bung for V2X efforts
The company said that its 14-strong consortium had won a place in phase two of the EU’s 5G infrastructure public private partnership (5GPPP), which was set up primarily to speed up the implementation of 5G networks across the bloc’s 28 member states.
Franck Bouetard, head of Ericsson France, said in a canned statement: “The European funding granted to our 5GCAR project is a major step, as it will allow our initiative to further develop in order to meet the market needs by 2020.”
The project will reportedly receive around €8m in funding from the EU over the next two years, according to Wireless Week.
The EU’s 5GCAR project, which is a subset of the 5GPPP, aims to build a “vehicle-to-everything”, or V2X, network. With firms such as Orange, Nokia, Volvo and Huawei on side with Ericsson, it’s a serious effort that deserves a closer look as it progresses.
Elsewhere, BlackBerry is taking worries about connected car security increasingly seriously as it updates its hypervisor for what it calls “the digital cockpit”.
It appears that in spite of some industry thinkers questioning the need for 5G, the EU is adopting a top-down approach to getting the technology deployed in the hope that industrial customers will start running services over the top of it – and, presumably, dragging consumers along with them. ®
