Life is a 5G Highway: Drive it All Night Long
As Sung by Rascal Flatts in 2020
Do you like zooming down the highway in your Aston Martin Valhalla? Or perhaps driving along in your eco-friendly Toyota Prius at a moderate speed?
The Omnidya team knows. We love supercars, eco-friendly hatchbacks, Polaris Slingshots, vintage Pontiacs, the list goes on.
Do you know what we don’t love? Bad traffic. Especially the bad traffic that causes accidents. Until recently, your driving excursions would’ve just been you, your mates and/or your trusted audiobooks/podcasts, and the local traffic reporters on the radio and TV. But now, you’ve got a new driving buddy.
Artificial Intelligence.
The 5G Highway
China Mobile has already begun work on a 5G highway that includes smart toll stations, thorough monitoring for real-time traffic information which is then run through an AI model to make predictions, and special features to accomodate autonomous cars.
5G technologies are also meeting highways in other ways (haha). Multiple countries are running pilot tests, and Finland recently announced that they want to build the “smartest road in the world.” Nokia will be providing smart light poles, and the first stretch of 5G Finnish highway is due to be 31km long.
Hot AI Models Improving Your All-American Driving Experience
AI has already been leveraged for a while to reduce traffic congestion and improve safety within the US as well. In November of last year, the Nevada Highway Patrol said that a yearlong partnership between state agencies and Israeli startup Waycare had resulted in a 17% overall reduction in crashes along a stretch of the northbound I-15 in Las Vegas. Waycare analyzes road conditions in real-time, leveraging in-car data and municipal traffic data. The startup also launched a crash prevention program in 2017 in Tampa, Florida.
And earlier this month, news broke that a Washington-based startup called Inrix had released a new AI traffic information system fittingly called, “Inrix AI Traffic.” The company has developed a geospatial engine that combines historical insights with real-time data to identify traffic conditions with an “amazing level of precision.”
So what sort of future will 5G highways create? A fantastically faster one. Are you excited?
