EMEA in perspective is a Monday column focused on the identification of regional trends and outcomes of the prior week’s news. Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA, has spent her entire career the telecom, IT and Security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News through daily contributions.
Over the course of the past week, Europe saw two major operators announce connected car efforts: Telefonica O2 and Orange. Although the announcements address two different aspects of this market.
Starting with Telefonica O2’s launch of Car Connection, the offer is focused on the aftermarket segment and helping to enable older vehicles with connected car functionality. It’s a pretty safe bet that all new vehicles will come with some level of these features today and if not they will allow for integration via your smartphone, but what about older vehicles? The goal of the offer is to address vehicles up to eight years old. This is Telefonica O2’s first step into this market and is in partnership with Zubie. Zubie provides a small device that plugs into a vehicle’s on-board diagnostic two port, contains a SIM card and links to your smartphone.
Vehicle diagnostics (such as battery voltage, check engine warnings) are transferred to your smartphone, you are able to track where you parked and potentially track a stolen vehicle. Geo-fencing can be set up in order to track if your vehicle leaves a specific area of allowed use when driven by an alternative driver and also the monitoring of young driver driving behavior. You can share your location to organize meetings or decide to keep your location private during certain times of the day. Trip statistics can also help to reduce costs and encourage more environmental awareness.
For now the service is only offered in Germany, the marketing video explains the launch below. It is in German, but many of the graphics should be self-explanatory for all viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueqD15ZOOgw
Orange Business Services announced a partnership with Tesla Motors in order to provide wireless connectivity in new Tesla Model S sold in France. The initiative within Orange is led by their Smart Cities & Territories program which was launched in 2011. The goal of the partnership is to provide connectivity to Tesla drivers in France via Orange’s mobile network and SIM cards. The service will support interactive navigation services, Internet radio and Web browsing, remote vehicle diagnostics and over-the-air upgrades of machine-to-machine software.
The question is, are these efforts enough? It’s great to see the European operators entering the connected car space across multiple countries, but I’m left asking what happens when the drivers cross country borders with these solutions. In Europe drivers cross country borders like American drivers cross state borders, very regularly. I’m assuming that both services continue to work with data roaming charges, but then who ends up paying the data roaming charges? The end user or the OEM, in the Tesla offer. No doubt about it, we need to keep moving forward, but I’m looking to see some operators offering more comprehensive partnerships with the OEM manufacturers. Still, I give kudos to Telefonica O2 and Orange for taking these first steps.
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