Chris Penrose offers insight into the value IoT provides to automotive manufacturers, and discusses new connected car partnership with the Bridge Alliance
During an interview at Mobile World Congress 2017, Chris Penrose, AT&T’s senior vice president of IoT, discussed the carrier’s quickly growing connected car business, as well as how the company is working to expand into new global markets.
Click here to see a video of Penrose’s comments.
“We’ve been obviously having a lot of success in the connected car business,” he said, which amounts to we’re more than 12 million cars on AT&T networks with growth around 1 million new connections per quarter. “We’ve got over 22 announced global brands that we’re working with. One of the interesting that we’re trying to do is that, there are a lot of services coming out of the car. Automakers are wanting to be able to get updates off a car and be able to update the car over the air similar to what we do with smartphones,” as well as offer safety, security, remote access and location-based services. “They’re also getting into a lot of these higher bandwidth services like streaming internet radio, real time mapping, Wi-Fi hot spots. As we add on more and more of those services, there’re certain services that we can provide globally. But if we’re getting into Wi-Fi in the car, for instance, you actually need to have a different type of relationship with carriers around the world.”
To better provide those global services, AT&T announced during MWC a partnership with Bridge Alliance, a group of carriers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East including SoftBank, Singtel, SK Telecom, China Unicom and many other operators.
Penrose said AT&T would incorporate Bridge Alliance members service delivery platforms into its IoT gateway, which “allows auto companies to write code, basically once, to us…to be able to provision those cars and manage those cars on a global scale. We want to be able to support auto companies around the world.”
In further discussion with RCR Wireless News and Enterprise IoT Insights, Penrose also stressed the importance of IoT security; click here to watch that video.
