4 ms·

This is kind of true, but only from a certain angle. For one, autonomous vehicles (the ones most people care about anyway - Waymo et al) are not widely using c

This is kind of true, but only from a certain angle. For one, autonomous vehicles (the ones most people care about anyway - Waymo et al) are not widely using connectivity between vehicles - who wants an autonomous vehicle that will only stop for other compatible vehicles? Instead they are almost entirely reliant on visual sensors etc. What has changed between 4G and 5G is the device to device protocol (which is not widely used and is completely incompatible with normal mobile signals) has been improved to support vehicles travelling at high speeds. But the thing is, there was already a protocol to enable that kind of communication and 5G does little if anything to improve on it. Autonomous vehicles are probably never going to rely on network connectivity to work properly - the risk of losing your connectivity is too great.

vvanders 8y ago
Yup, it's way too easy to dump RFI that throws off everything. Without fail my 2 meter radio keys up in about 70% of the drivethroughs I go through. Some of them are probably due to overloading the front end, some of them probably aren't filtered well enough. Had a microwave that would take out WiFi in a ~200ft radius when it was running. Etc.
mikec3010 8y ago
> the risk of losing your connectivity is too great. Additionally the risk of benign or malicious interference is too great. We can't live in a world where a 14-year old with a soldering iron and $20 in parts can jam 12 lanes of traffic at rush hour. Or where a solar wind or foreign enemy can cause mass casualty events such as disconnecting all autonomous vehicles simultaneously. I wonder if a low bandwidth directional link might be best. Where all cars in a "pack" agree they have the same firmware. Then do each others calculations and then confirm whether they agree by only checking a hash of the calculation. This would be a much smaller payload and could be transmitted on redundant channels on different bands. It would at least be harder to jam.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > where a 14-year old with a soldering iron and $20 in parts can jam 12 lanes of traffic Well... not to be argumentative or anything, but a 14-year-old with a smaller budget could easily cause similar chaos on a busy highway by, say, rolling a heavy object down a hill onto it or throwing some spiked gardening tools onto the road at night. Although they don't generally do that, protesters do pretty much the same thing (that's how we all first started hearing about BLM, recall).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zkms 8y ago
    > but a 14-year-old with a smaller budget could easily cause similar chaos on a busy highway by, say, rolling a heavy object down a hill onto it or throwing some spiked gardening tools onto the road at night. Doing that puts them at severe risk of detection and capture, doesn't scale well, is pretty easy to remedy, and dealing with foreign objects on roadways is pretty easy (people drive around them, and maintenance personnel and/or police move them off the road) and needs to be because it happens all the time without any malicious actors involved.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    Punks throwing shit off the overpass definitely couldn't stop a 6 lane freeway in both directions, but yes I see your point.

vvanders 8y ago

Yup, it's way too easy to dump RFI that throws off everything. Without fail my 2 meter radio keys up in about 70% of the drivethroughs I go through. Some of them are probably due to overloading the front end, some of them probably aren't filtered well enough. Had a microwave that would take out WiFi in a ~200ft radius when it was running. Etc.

mikec3010 8y ago

> the risk of losing your connectivity is too great. Additionally the risk of benign or malicious interference is too great. We can't live in a world where a 14-year old with a soldering iron and $20 in parts can jam 12 lanes of traffic at rush hour. Or where a solar wind or foreign enemy can cause mass casualty events such as disconnecting all autonomous vehicles simultaneously. I wonder if a low bandwidth directional link might be best. Where all cars in a "pack" agree they have the same firmware. Then do each others calculations and then confirm whether they agree by only checking a hash of the calculation. This would be a much smaller payload and could be transmitted on redundant channels on different bands. It would at least be harder to jam.

commandlinefan 8y ago
> where a 14-year old with a soldering iron and $20 in parts can jam 12 lanes of traffic Well... not to be argumentative or anything, but a 14-year-old with a smaller budget could easily cause similar chaos on a busy highway by, say, rolling a heavy object down a hill onto it or throwing some spiked gardening tools onto the road at night. Although they don't generally do that, protesters do pretty much the same thing (that's how we all first started hearing about BLM, recall).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zkms 8y ago
  > but a 14-year-old with a smaller budget could easily cause similar chaos on a busy highway by, say, rolling a heavy object down a hill onto it or throwing some spiked gardening tools onto the road at night. Doing that puts them at severe risk of detection and capture, doesn't scale well, is pretty easy to remedy, and dealing with foreign objects on roadways is pretty easy (people drive around them, and maintenance personnel and/or police move them off the road) and needs to be because it happens all the time without any malicious actors involved.
- mikec3010 8y ago
  Punks throwing shit off the overpass definitely couldn't stop a 6 lane freeway in both directions, but yes I see your point.