At last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco and Telus announced 5G capabilities in North America to serve IoT use cases across verticals, with a focus on connected cars.

The network will serve as a foundation to support drive testing by a major North American automotive manufacturer’s 5G connected car, while setting the stage for enhanced experiences for customers and revenue opportunities for car makers.

With these enhanced capabilities, Telus’ control centre powered by Cisco can support automated provisioning, dynamic policy, charging and quota management outcomes to launch subscription services on demand, and manage SIM and vehicle lifecycle for any connected car OEM or enterprise.

The partners are helping connected car OEMs orchestrate and automate the end user experience effortlessly with the IoT control centre’s rich Rest API portfolio. This launch lets the OEM leverage Telus’ wireless network to introduce 5G enabled telematics, infotainment applications and network services, along with subscription wifi services to customers.

With electrification and software-defined vehicles driving the future of the connected mobility ecosystem, this innovation lays the foundation for OEMs to offer on-board applications and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) services in the future, while carving a path into subscription services to support OEMs’ revenue diversification goals. Consumers can subscribe to services on demand from the vehicle or an OEM web portal, access threshold-based subscription notifications, and renew or cancel services seamlessly, all of which can be orchestrated by the OEM using Cisco’s mobility services platform.

“Cisco mobility services platform with 5G is ushering in a new era for connected cars to deliver amazing customer experience for the drivers while paving the path for car makers to drive better experience and services over mobile networks,” said Masum Mir, senior vice president at Cisco.

Jodi Baxter, vice president at Telus, added: “As a global technology leader, Telus prides itself on delivering the best in connected car capabilities, which is why we are excited to partner with Cisco. We have Canada’s only dedicated IoT core network and this partnership is an important step in supporting 5G drive testing for vehicle manufacturers and transitioning LTE vehicles to our superior network, which will help create a safe and more connected experience.”

The collaboration also introduces on-demand network slice creation, full-stack observability with service assurance and life-cycle management capabilities in a contained lab environment, aimed at supporting mission-critical use cases in the future.

Cisco (www.cisco.com) and Telus (www.telus.com) say they are laying the foundation for OEMs to get full visibility and control of their network services and drive quality of service on demand with predictive intelligence and automated assurance so they can offer a better end customer experience.

The collaboration is a building block of Cisco’s mobility services platform strategy to help service providers increase return on investment with low risk, and drive 5G monetisation with value-added services and API based network programmability outcomes.