The Cruise glitch will dominate MWC Vegas. Here’s why

Last week, almost a dozen driverless cars caused a traffic jam in San Francisco that lasted an estimated 15 minutes. The reason? The wireless network supporting the Cruise robotaxis went down.

The incident, detailed in a San Francisco Chronicle article as well as by other local publications, will undoubtedly underpin sales pitches from a variety of wireless companies, including those planning to attend the upcoming MWC Las Vegas trade show at the end of next month.

Why? Because the wireless networks controlling the cars were overloaded by the nearby Outside Lands music festival. Meaning, all the Instagram posts from fans of the Foo Fighters, Kendrick Lamar and Lil Yachty (which is apparently the name of a popular rap musician) overloaded a network that was also supposed to support General Motorol’s Cruise driverless car effort.

Specifically, Cruise said the traffic jam was caused by “wireless connectivity issues,” according to the Chronicle. San Francisco police confirmed to the publication that the Outside Lands music festival overtaxed the wireless network in the area.

“We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again and apologize to those impacted,” Cruise said in a statement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It’s unclear which wireless provider is at fault. GM has a broad agreement with AT&T. But like Walmart’s drones, it’s likely that Cruise’s robotaxi services use a wide range of wireless networks for redundancy.

Cue the outrage

“Personally I would redesign the autonomous system to not be dependent on an external network,” wrote Geoff Hollingworth, the CMO of Rakuten Symphony, on LinkedIn. Rakuten Symphony is selling technology and services for private networks.

“Time to get ‘street smart’ and deploy intelligent infrastructure,” wrote Jeffrey DeCoux of the Autonomy Institute on LinkedIn. The organization focuses on research for “advancing intelligent infrastructure, autonomy and AI at the edge.”

“The market NEEDS network slicing to fix these problems. We are developing technology and depending on the network to get things done. But all of the geniuses developing drones and cars and forklifts and other devices haven’t planned on having outages when there’s a concert nearby,” noted Joe Madden of Mobile Experts on LinkedIn. The analyst firm advises companies on wireless technologies and the wireless industry.

These kinds of comments likely represent the tip of the iceberg. A large and growing number of companies are selling products and services to address connectivity issues like the one affecting GM’s Cruise.

Public slices and private wireless

The Chronicle reported that San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin discussed the traffic jam with officials from Cruise. According to the publication, Peskin was told by Cruise “that the company is now considering creating its own cell phone network just for its San Francisco operations.”

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.