Gadgetory

so the first question and it's a fair one is y4g what's the big deal first of all the phrase for G in the car has a lot in it let's unpack the phrase because it tells us much first of all for G that means greater bandwidth more speed for G provides faster pipes so all of a sudden you have the ability to do things with less lag time for people that are in the car the experience is just that much better yeah it really is this for G was designed with IP in mind where's 3G was really designed to support voice services 4G is really designed to support IP based services internet applications the next part of that phrase is in the car we're talking about an embedded connection that is part of the vehicle as opposed to it being tethered off your phone you're not looking down potentially on your smartphone which you shouldn't be using to find the address and looking around trying to see a house number you have the ability to do a search for a destination and actually be able to zoom in and see a full 360-degree panorama of your destination before you even start driving you have the ability to get data in and out very quickly IHS automotive currently forecast the modest 1.2 million 4G cars on the road by the end of 2015 but spiking globally the 16 million just two years later this 2015 Chevy Suburban and right now is going to be among the first of what will be a majority of General Motors cars starting with a 2015 model year that have or offer built-in 4G connectivity howdy may have gotten there first but GM looks as though they're gonna get their biggest at least for the foreseeable future and both out en General Motors say that the hotspot created in these vehicles by 4G is dramatically better than one created by 3G as in the past look at this connection speed on my laptop on the network via the 4G hotspot in the Audi a3 and this is just one snapshot of course but during a day of usage I saw connection times that allowed me to focus on the content and not the connection that's feticide persistence of connection is a very interesting part of this story once you've got a constant connection in the vehicle you start to change your habits a bit you learn to rely on things like connected nav streaming media access to various types of apps things that right now are seen as a bit of an elective will start to become part and parcel of what driving is an tantalizingly we may see manufacturers get in the habit of OTA our over-the-air software updates thanks to persistent for Jake that means you may wake up one morning get a confirmation screen that says we've updated the software in your vehicle enjoy your new services and your new interface it's the same to likely get with our smartphones once or twice a year but cars have never done that now you can keep things fresh over the lifetime of the car but also its immediate freshness you have the ability to bring material from the cloud into the car as we know recalls and having that the reprogramming of computer systems is a huge expense for the car companies they'll be able to do this over the air without requiring the consumer to take it to the shop which is gonna be huge they get a ton of diagnostic data from the car before you go to the shop they'll know what's wrong with it then the health of the car and other stats of course the question many of you are already thinking is benefit who pays for this I'm gonna have another mobile data plan well right now yes it's a typically 14 to $20 a month add on for the very few cars that have come out with 4G built in in the near future I suspect you won't have to pay at all except with your personal driving data which is rich in value and your car is going to be collecting information and sending it back whether it's how you're performing in traffic if there are potholes maybe weather conditions I think we'll see a model where we have a lot more crowd-sourced data for each car phase through the node on that network that's communicating and then data is aggregated in a cloud and brought back to that vehicle which brings us to security and privacy something where the stakes get even higher when you're dealing with a big moving object and one that reflects a lot of detail about our daily lives there are all kinds of things that the industry can do in including communiques to enable a very secure connection between the car and the cloud over a 4G network but you need to follow those steps to be able to make that as tight as as it needs to be so far car makers are keeping 4G connections sandbox within infotainment making sure that the systems are secure and that they're isolated from other parts of the car that potentially could pose a threat embedded 4G is not a matter of if but when at this point and the next two to three model years will reveal the many ways car makers intend to convince you it's worth paying for one way or the other you