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Welcome Address for the Fully Networked Car – A Workshop on ICT in Vehicles |
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Bangkok, Thailand |
07 March 2007 |
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Ladies and gentlemen,
It is an honour and pleasure for me to welcome you here today for the
opening of this third workshop on the topic of information communications
technologies in motor vehicles. Being a technocrat and a car enthusiast this
is the perfect venue for me!
This year I would like to thank both the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
for their help in organizing the event and I would also like to thank the
steering committee for their hard work in putting the programme together and
of course the Geneva Motor Show for agreeing to host the event for the
second time.
The car industry and the ICT industry are different in many ways. The
average life cycle of a mobile phone or a computer is just a couple of years
compared to a car, which might stay on the road for ten or more years.
Profit margins and therefore business models are complex and historically
the foundation of the two industries is different. But both service two very
integral parts of modern life, transportation and communication. Bridging
this gap may take some effort, but the benefits in terms of safety and
business generation will be great.
Collaboration at international level is imperative in order to create the
technology and facilitate the cooperation necessary for an open market in
telematics for cars. This effort will advance the industry, and avoid
duplication and counterproductive effort.
Participants in our previous events agreed that the fully networked car will
only be achieved by fostering these collaborative efforts. They stressed the
need for more standardization. It was recognised that both the automotive
and the telecommunication industries will benefit from a collaborative
effort.
The ICT sector has seen many successes in terms of standardization providing
facilities that we now take for granted. If it wasn’t for standards in
telecommunications it would be impossible to call from one country to
another, or even from one telecommunication network to another. Global
standards have succeeded in ensuring interoperability in telecoms networks
and enabling many new innovative services, whilst allowing service providers
to keep costs down and customers happy. ITU-T as producer of many of these
standards can claim to be a key architect of the world’s telecommunication
networks and is now putting effort into many new initiatives to bring other
standards bodies together to avoid duplicating effort and to address
convergence in areas such as the one addressed in this workshop. That is why
I am so pleased to have had the cooperation of ISO and IEC in the
organization of this workshop.
I would also like to offer my sincere gratitude to the sponsors of this
event including Cisco, Ygomi, Head Acoustics and SVOX.
Recently representatives of the car industry including DaimlerChrysler,
Harman/Becker and Volkswagen joined with more traditional ITU-T members at
the first meeting of the ITU-T Focus Group From/In/To Car Communication. The
Focus Group worked on specifications that deal with speakerphone audio
quality, aiming to provide a specification that will help to improve the
speech - and sound - quality between different devices. Second priority is
requirements for headsets including wireless. Input and therefore
participation is also required in the area of testing for interaction
between the network and hands-free terminals. In addition speech recognition
will be addressed. A second Focus Group meeting hosted by Harman/Becker will
take place in Ulm, Germany following this workshop on the 15th March chaired
by Hans Gierlich who has also been the chair of the steering committee for
this event.
In addition to the Focus Group ITU-T hosts the Advisory Panel for Standards
Cooperation on Telecommunications related to Motor Vehicles - APSC TELEMOV.
Its goal is to strengthen cooperation amongst the SDOs involved in the
industry, to improve information exchange between organizations and avoid
duplication of efforts as well as to identify open issues in standardization
activities and stimulate cooperation on how and where to best address those
open issues
Other related work in the standardization sector of ITU includes studies on
performance and QoS, multimedia terminals, systems and applications,
ubiquitous applications (e-Everything), security and mobile telecoms.
Specifically two study areas are looking at hands-free communications in
vehicles and performance evaluation of services based on speech technology.
There is also ongoing work in the standardization sector on protection
against electromagnetic environmental effects – looking at methodologies to
predict and mitigate electromagnetic compatibility problems that may prevent
the complex variety of both wireless and wireline technologies from working
successfully together.
In ITU’s Radiocommunications Sector is studying satellite navigation systems
to determinate location and guidance, and transport information and control
systems. ITU-R has developed a standard (ITU-R Recommendation M.1453)
defines specifications for wi-fi transmission from moving vehicles, and has
been recently modified to take into account next generation IP (IPv6).
Current studies also cover new technologies for ITS, software defined radio
(SDR), adaptive antenna and ultra wide band (UWB) technologies.
I would like to invite you to become involved in these studies if you have
not already.
Over the next three days you will see and hear speakers from around the
world present the main topics of current interest with regards to the
synergy between ICTs and the automotive sectors. Please engage these experts
in dialogue so that we have an interactive and dynamic event, and please
visit the exhibition - new for this year – showcasing some of the
technologies examined by the workshop.
But first, I now have the pleasure of introducing Alan Bryden,
Secretary-General of ISO who will provide his opening remarks.
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