The IMC caught up with Fibocom’s Lars Thyroff at the recent Embedded World conference in Nuremberg. Steve Rogerson looks at what he had to say about electric vehicles and other IoT opportunities.

The European parliament has taken the brave move to ban new combustion engine cars. In a far from unanimous vote (339 to 249 with 24 abstentions), it decided that all new cars and vans must be zero emission from 2035.

That is only thirteen years away during which time the countries across the continent have to build an infrastructure to support electric vehicle charging. I think they will manage that; charging infrastructure is already being rolled out and now they have a deadline.

Plus, it is in the car makers’ interests to help. Research and development work on combustion engine cars has all but dried up and all the car makers are seriously investing in hybrid and full electric vehicle technology.

But what will this mean for the IoT sector? To answer that, at last week’s Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, Keith Kreisher, executive director of the IoT M2M Council (IMC), had a word with Lars Thyroff, general manager of Fibocom Wireless in the EU. He asked him which IoT applications he thought would have enormous potential.

He replied that it was no big secret that there were six or seven verticals that were showing great potential, but the one he singled out was EV charging, which he said was having a huge impact within the broader theme of micromobility.

“When you consider that 80 to 90 million new cars are sold annually, and we reckon that at least two charging stations will be required for each vehicle, the numbers are huge,” he said. “If you need to drive from point A to point B, then you will need a charging station at both locations. Saying that you will stop producing combustion engines is one thing, but it requires a lot of infrastructure build-out. This market is clearly growing but it will take a lot of public and private investment.”

One of the big issues in the IoT world is whether to process information in the cloud or at the edge, a major question when it comes to artificial intelligence applications where a lot of data needs handling but latency can be an issue if this is done in the cloud.

Thyroff said the construct of edge versus cloud required technology adopters to think about how they were building out their applications.

“To cite just one simple example, you can optimise for data management or for energy consumption,” he said. “This requires a lot of thinking before development can even begin.”

Fibocom, he said, had restructured its product portfolio to support this kind of planning, with four categories: mobile broadband; reliable low latency communications; machine-type communications; and mobile computing using programmable SoCs.

Fixed wireless access (FWA) for homes and businesses has become a frontrunner in the application of 5G technology, which is a scalable and powerful complement to fixed broadband. Fibocom has a strategy.

“We’ve recently launched our FM-160 and FG-160 line of modules, configured specifically for these applications,” said Thyroff. “They meet the latest 3GPP standards and feature the latest Qualcomm X62 modem chips. It allows for 900Gbyte downlink and 900Mbyte uplink, so it’s ideal for FWA development. We’ve brought the product here to Embedded World and it’s been nominated for an Innovation Award at the show.”

There was also a lot talk about private networking at Embedded World. Kreisher asked him how he saw this playing out.

“Private networking plays a dominant role in Industry 4.0, but it’s becoming very important in other application categories as well, such as precision agriculture, healthcare and building management,” said Thyroff. “For these applications, we’ve developed our FN 101 LTE Cat-6 product, which supports the Citizens’ Broadband Radio Service (CBRS). It functions on bands 43 and 48 and allows 260Mbyte/s downlink and 30Mbyte/s uplink, so it’s very appropriate for private networks.”

For those who don’t know Fibocom, it is a Chinese company founded in 1999 and provides wireless communication modules. However, it has global operations and its products and services are available in more than a hundred countries.

As to the EV infrastructure, the big problem is, of course, range anxiety, that horrible feeling that you have not enough charge to reach your destination. However, car maker Volkswagen thinks that in the UK at least mobile phones are to blame as its recent survey found that more than half of Brits panic if they think the battery in their phone will run out. It concluded that charging anxiety among EV considerers might be more to do with human psychology than EV infrastructure. They may have a point.