Comment by AlotOfReading
2 months ago
The networking on AVs is usually redundant across multiple cellular networks to deal with coverage and outage issues. They also use business sims, which usually have a slightly higher network priority than consumers. If waymo's also negotiated to use one of the infrastructure QCIs instead, it would take some seriously disastrous network conditions for them to experience meaningful congestion.
I wonder if the cars also have some sort of mesh (LoRaWAN?) network to help each other out in temporary dead zones, emergencies, etc.
Bandwidth is problematic for mesh. A remote assistance situation would involve at least 4 high definition camera streams, and ideally with minimal latency. It's challenging to put that much data onto public spectrum even if you wanted to make a custom radio.
I was thinking more for communicating the “mass disruption in progress” message - or even just distributing the manually verified “traffic lights down” data between vehicles.