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akimball wrote:Interesting discussion. Have spent most of this year designing switches for a major Detroit auto-manufacture. Think 8x T1 GbE connections and six 10-GbE connections per switch, and six of these per car. 3 required but 3 more for redundancy. So each switch can handle 68-Gbits of traffic, non-blocking. This is mostly for LIDaR and various cameras...plenty of ultrasonic and radar sensors.
The internet connections are because self driving vehicles need the latest information for roads, conditions, and traffic. But consider also how they are to be used; WE ARE NOT THE END CUSTOMERS. Large companies will manage large fleets of these vehicles to use 10-million of them (by 2022) to pick you up 'uber style' at your home and take you where you need to go. The big car companies and companies like mine are changing the paradigm for driving.... riders won't need to buy a car, won't need to worry about fuel, insurance, maintenance. Just use your smart phone and in 60-seconds your car awaits. That's what is going on. GM, Ford, Tesla....all on board.
akimball wrote:I don't think youll see cars wheeling over the edge of the LA freeway in a DDoS attack...they really are autonomous. But maybe they won't pick up the next customer.
akimball wrote:You see, it's not that you won't be able to buy one of these cars...you could at a price and probably a heavily subsidized price....the systems in these cars will cost $150,000 dollars initially. That will fall quickly. But to make these cars pay for themselves, the last thing you want is an autonomous car sitting in a garage fully charged. It needs to be out, connected, picking up and delivering busy passengers uber style. This 'fleet model' is what is driving the autonomous revolution.
jay (support) wrote:Ah, but that's where Uber/Lyft etc. will come in. When you're not using your car, you have them schedule it to run as part of their fleet! You control the schedule of when it's available, etc.
Hmmmm, how about a blended model: you purchase a "limited use" car: a car that's dedicated to you during predefined periods (evenings, weekends, whatever) and the rest of the time it belongs to the fleet. That's an interesting way to get a better car than one might be able to afford purchasing outright because you're only buying a percentage of the car...
Agreed. But, that kind of data, while perhaps requiring QoS, doesn't necessarily require high-speed. It's not like they're streaming video in order to make decisions about changing lanes. That's my point: high-speed internet being required by cars is just FUD by Comcast in an attempt to sway public opinion.
I also agree that it's less about consumer cars than fleets operated by Uber, etc. But this leads me to another thing net neutrality will protect against: let's say Comcast enters an agreement with Uber. Does Comcast then have the right to throttle communication with, say, Lyft's cars in favor of Uber such that Lyft's cars always arrive a bit later?
The stickyness there comes in on who pays for the fuel (or electricity) and/or how are you assured that when your scheduled time comes up, the car's not returned to you with dry tanks or a dead battery pack when you've got 10 minutes to get to a meeting across town?
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