Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:10):
It has become something of a tradition at the Great Telco debate to feature an onstage interview with a special guest who can provide an alternate take on our industry Coming from a slightly different angle. It's really, really useful because I think we assume too much within the industry in the telecoms industry. So we are going to have a little fireside chat now and then we will do our final session. So could you first of all please join me in welcoming our special guest who is Colin Lee of Jaguar Land Rover, of JLR and is also a board member of the 5GAA, the 5G Automotive Association. Colin, welcome. Thank you very much Colin. We met fairly recently at a 5GAA event in Berlin. I think everyone here probably knows Jaguar Land Rover, especially this week. There's a lot of attention in the press, but it's a well established set of family of brands. Maybe not everyone is as familiar with 5GAA. Can you just give us a quick pre here what 5GAA is and what it sets out to achieve?

Colin Lee, JLR (01:19):
Sure. So thank you for having me here by the way. It's been great listening to what's been the talks and debates. So 5GAA about seven years ago, the OEMs really wanted to start expanding into the communication world, but they really were doing it, but doing it perhaps not as good as perhaps they wanted to because they didn't know enough about communication. Equally, you had the telcos at that point wasn't that interested in the automotive world because it hadn't really started, so therefore they had other things on their plate. So five GIA was pulled together to try and join the dots between the telco industry and the automotive industry. And I have to say the first two years literally talking cheese one minute, we didn't understand what the problems were with the telco side. They didn't understand what we were doing on the OM side. But I can say over the years we've been doing this, there has been a lot of understanding and we've even expanded to do things like the roadside equipment as well, which start to talk to those and we're expanded even further now into satellite and all that kind of stuff. So it's been quite exciting.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:33):
Now when you talk about OEMs, it probably means something different to us in the telecoms industry. What do you mean by OEMs?

Colin Lee, JLR (02:39):
They're basically the Jaguar land work rovers, the car manufacturers, OEMs.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:43):
Great, okay. And as you say, it was chalk and cheese to begin with perhaps, but ever since car phones first appeared in a really rudimentary form factors, there's been this relationship with cars and the automotive sector, things are getting better. But what would you say the is at the moment between these two industries?

Colin Lee, JLR (03:05):
Good. Much better than it's been. But the biggest problem I think that was there at the beginning was we constantly kept on saying we weren't always connected environment. The problem we found when we were talking to the telco industries was they talk about connectivity as per hundred thousand circa in terms of their customer base. But of course we're on trunk roads between the two, right? So whatever we are doing is different for what they were doing. Very similar back in the DAB world when we had traffic going over DAB where they were concentrating on big cities and that, but they weren't concentrating on the cars going between the two. So it's got better. And what's lovely about this is we don't have a direct three GPP connection from an OE em, but of course they do and other people do. And the understanding that we've given them are now starting to come out to fruition on three gpp. So the things that they're asking for now is actually what we need on the cards.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:02):
Well this is really interesting, isn't it? Because you do have that relationship with the telecom standards organization through GPP and there is, I said this relationship there and one of the developments that really impressed me recently was the V two X vehicle to everything. Can you give us a little background as to what V two X is and what it actually means for you in the automotive industry?

Colin Lee, JLR (04:24):
Well, first of all, I've been doing V two X for about 18 years. So V two X is a vehicle to anything. The idea is that if you can have a vehicle that's able to connect to another vehicle and look inside of what it's doing, so all of its little things that's moving around, like when they press the brake, we know it when it's being pressed, when they turn the lights on, we know when it's turned on. So if we needed to, if they're breaking, we know they're going to break, we know they're braking or if we've taken the foot of the accelerator, we know they've done that. So that's the type of thing you can do when you communicate between two cars. Then between the car and the infrastructure, traffic lights, road gantries, what they call it, roadworks, all those types of things. So we know when we go in over the hill for example, we know that there's a traffic jam, can't see it before you go because we know there's a red light, we've picked it up.

(05:15):
Then of course we've got vehicle to network, which is where we go through the LT at the moment. Then we've also got vehicle to people. So we can detect, for example, if there's a bus and they've come out the front door and they decide to go in front of the bus, we know that they're walking through in front of the bus. So therefore we can take action earlier not to cause trouble there. And when I say everything, there's stuff we've not even spoken about. There's vehicle to grid, there's vehicle to all kinds of things that we can do in the future as well. And vehicle to network to vehicle is another one where you're going through the network into a vehicle. So there's lots.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:51):
Now being in this industry for quite a few years, every time we have a new cellular standard, a new generation, we see lists of use cases and industries that are going to be the beneficiaries and how telcos can attract revenue from these industries thanks to this latest generation of technology. And we've seen it from generation to generation to generation. So when 5G was appearing up at the top of the list there, near the top was automotive, it was there, it was a dead cert use case and we're going to be talking about six G. And already we're seeing that's a definite use case. There's going to be a great source of revenue there for the telcos, but what is the reality? Automotive is always going to be one of these killer apps of 5G, but what's the actual reality and are you banging on the telco's doors and saying, Hey, we need 5G and even that's not enough, we can't wait for six G.

Colin Lee, JLR (06:45):
Good question. I mean when we were looking into 5G, we are struggling to justify it because to be honest, 4G does pretty much everything we want to do today. And when we look to the future, it seems to do everything we want to do in the future to a certain degree. But knowing that we had to go that direction, especially what happened with 3G when it disappeared. So we had no choice but go forward, but we didn't really have a justifiable reason to do it. Having said that, as you start going through the gs, you end up having the extra capability with the V two X type, for example, like the battery saving capability, the detecting pedestrians and having the capability talking pedestrians, adding non-terrestrial networks. And that's where I think the longer term mindset is in terms of going through the gs. If you took it today on the stuff we have in the cars today, we don't necessarily need 5G, but as you start moving through the capabilities of what you're going to do in the future, that's where we get excited.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:47):
And you mentioned non-terrestrial networks. Is this a real request from you? Is this something you really see value

Colin Lee, JLR (07:56):
In? We see value in, well, we did some work on some geo technology way back and found that actually it wasn't very good for the car. They were going up the hill and we're losing connection. They're going down the hill. But as we start going to Leo, it opens up the world. And the thing is we're looking for always connected, right? And it was interesting listening to the last session because we have a multiplexer coming to our car where we've got all of the various different things like Bluetooth, wifi, we have UU 4G in this case today we also have PC five be the kind of V two X that would be done there and possibly in the future we'll have NTN. But ultimately what happens, we want to get all that information coming in, but it has to go into the car in the same way. And so we don't really mind where it comes from as long as we don't not spend a load of money doing it. And also we don't need a lot of lots. Some things like updating the car can be done via wifi. It could be undo via obviously LTE or anything like that. But at the same time, we are trying to utilize all of the capabilities out there to improve our, what's the word? Our customer service really

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:17):
All this information you're talking about, the transfer of information, it brings us the data. Let's talk data because I remember when I started getting really interested in all this, it was about seven, eight years ago, I've had to write some of this down and do some research. It was a few years ago, and Intel were doing some work on this and they were putting out a lot of releases and white papers saying Incar data collection would amount to four terabytes of data a day. And it's just about seven, eight years ago. It's a huge number and it's all this data is the new oil and it's massive. And then I think quite recently it was cruise in San Francisco who reported on their trial saying only 1% of all this collective data from all our sensors in the car. It is actually really relevant to us and really, really useful. So when we talk about cars and the evolution of cars and getting to more autonomous ways of traveling, you think of all the sensors, but there's a huge amount of data in the car. We we're not surely transferring all that data at all times.

Colin Lee, JLR (10:13):
I couldn't possibly imagine us doing that amount of data. I mean obviously if you connected everything to everything and had all of the sensors shown again with everyone and also having loads of videos and loads of stuff like that, that might be possible. You get to that level. But we can't process that kind of work inside the car. I mean we have several networks in the car which have certain things, but the worst thing we can have is when you press a brake and we're waiting for the network to flush out before the brakes are actually applied. So the worst thing we can do, we have to put a cap on amount of data coming in to make sure that we don't interfere with the car. And if we finding the data that's coming in is changing by the way, we'll never get to that stage. We would definitely throw back on anything coming in. So I can't see us getting to that point, if you see what I mean. Certainly not in the short term for sure.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:02):
Well, when we spoke at the Berlin event you were hosting, you and I spoke about path data, this concept of path data for when the car's actually moving along autonomous. This was great, this was new and this sounded really interesting. Can you explain what you mean by path data? This really helps narrow down what sort of shared data we're talking about.

Colin Lee, JLR (11:20):
So when you've got an autonomous car, the first thing you've got to do is calculate your path or where you're going to go. So you have your sensors, you have a map in your brain and you basically drive down that road. Now if it's the same road, fine, the path is the same, but if you've come across a roadworks have to, the car has to calculate a path of how it's going to get around that roadworks and it does that very slowly so clearly. And also it could be sharing lidar data that's possible, but the amount of time to process LIDAR data when you are saying to the car behind will be far too long. So it's much quicker to look at a path plan that somebody else has done and work on that and build on that. And what you'll see is a load of lines going over the same path, but eventually there'll be a sweet spot where everyone just keeps on using that sweet spot and then the next day when they go to head and try and use that same path, but the roadworks have moved, that first car will start doing another path which will then pass us on.

(12:19):
So what we do is try and simplify rather than do it. Now, obviously when we get back home, we could possibly do all of this and send it through wifi to update a big area and if we fill the maps and so on, and if we feel that we need to do it immediately because of whatever reason, then we could do it immediately, but it wouldn't be all the time.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:39):
Which brings us onto a quite significant question, which is who pays for all of this? Because I can see the telcos and have for years looked at this as a great revenue opportunity. I can see maybe the OEM thinking this is not the cost on the sheet or the cost of creating of a car. Do we sell these services to drivers as subscriptions? What do we the public who will be buying these vehicles? Are we even aware or what might be coming here? I still think there's a disconnect as to who finances all of this.

Colin Lee, JLR (13:10):
Well, we have actually got two sim cards in our car. One, it's what we use to things like diagnostics, making sure we understand the cars running right, making sure that we can update the car in terms of software over the air and all that kind of stuff. But then they've got a customer side which might want to, they might want to put maps on it and so on for their navigation. But most of the time the customers don't put syn card in. They're just using their mobile phones and quite often they use Apple Play or CarPlay or that kind of thing because they don't particularly want to pay. So there is a problem here because there we've got some great ideas that we'd love to do, but putting together a business plan that makes sense. It is not there yet. We are getting there, but we're not there yet.

(13:52):
I mean, I'll put the question to the audience. Would you pay a thousand pound extra when you get your car to get the features we want to give to you? The chances are you won't, especially if you know can get it for 79 p on here. You know what I'm saying? But the difference is once we do have that data in the car, we can do a lot more. Like I said, when we go over that hill, we know there's traffic behind it. We know there's people, crowds of people coming out from a rugby game before we go over that hill. Now you would buy a car and say, well, we're paying for the safety capability of that car. But what we are trying to do is build on that safety but also do things like information, other things like payment capabilities. So that wouldn't be great so that you'll go into aisle of white and you don't have to worry about the ferrett's all been dealt with.

(14:39):
Just go on, don't even have to do a ticket. It's all dealt with. But unfortunately for us to do that, we have to have connectivity in the car and somebody has to pay for it. So yeah, we do have challenges and it's not just jli. All OEMs have challenges and some OEMs have made big steps, others are very cautious and just waiting to see what the market's doing. And the other thing of course is the market penetration rate. So it's easy to do something on a cellular base already there. Cars have had cellular in their cars since about 2018 because of eco. It was mandated. But then to expand on that, it's been difficult to know how to really build on it. But we do it because our customers want it. So we do it, but so we have to balance up the costs.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:28):
Well, Colin's going to be staying with us at the end of the event. So any questions for Colin? Please find Colin later in the networking area. And Colin said he's happy to talk to any of you, but I've got one final question I'd like to leave you with. We're about to go into a session that's looking at the next generation of cellular technology. We know we think as an industry what we want, maybe not the same thing, but various aspects of the industry has its own ideas. What do you want as the automotive industry from telecoms moving forward? What can we do that's going to help you?

Colin Lee, JLR (16:01):
There's only one thing we want always connected. I don't care how you do it always connected. Once you've got always connected, it makes it a lot easier to sell a service. For example, if we did wildfire and we could direct you around it, that'd be wonderful, wouldn't it? But if you're not in service, it just doesn't work. So we are constantly switching between various different levels and we don't always get it right. But if the telco industry can focus on how we get always connected, that would make my life a lot easier. That's all I can say. The rest of it will follow.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:33):
Fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for talking with us at the Great Telco debate. Please round of applause for Colin.

Colin Lee, JLR (16:38):
Thank you.