As technology advances and cellular network bandwidth expands, fleets have higher expectations when it comes to being able to predict potential problems before they happen. And as 3G networks are being decommissioned, new opportunities are on the rise for fleets and their mobile workforce.

Peter Mitchell, who was recently appointed general manager at Verizon Connect, emphasized the importance of leveraging higher bandwidth to keep vehicles and people connected to improve safety on the job and increase revenue overall.

“The core remains the vehicle, but we are increasingly doing things on the safety side, like connected and intelligent dash cams, where we could take in a video stream and figure out if there is risky behavior happening. It really opens up our customers eyes to what’s going on,” Mitchell explained.

Mitchell came to Verizon Connect through the acquisition of Fleetmatics, where he served as chief technology officer and co-founder. He was subsequently appointed senior vice president and chief technology officer for the broader Verizon Connect organization and has led product, engineering and user experience teams across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.

Mitchell provided some insights on the sunsetting of 3G technology and the opportunities that higher bandwidth can provide for connected vehicle technology moving forward.

FleetOwner: How has fleet adoption of technology evolved over the years?

Peter Mitchell: When we started at Fleetmatics it wasn’t uncommon that we had to encourage people to get broadband—now they all have broadband. In 2011, we saw this massive adoption of mobile that wasn’t there before, and it really allowed small to medium businesses and owner-operators a way to be productive while they were out in the field.

But as the general technology tide rises, so do expectations of the software—usability and user friendliness and the ability to not just provide a whole stream of data but to actually hone in on the deep insights.

Our customers are busy, so we want to alleviate tasks for them. We want to make them more efficient, make sense of everything that is going on in the field. Today, people want the context of everything, including video technology and field compliance services. And they want to know how they can be much more successful in their journey. Then, they start to get into predictive, which allows them to make smarter decisions.

FO: When will 3G networks be decommissioned, and what can fleets expect from 4G connectivity?

PM: That is happening—the 3G networks are being decommissioned; it’s a phased shutdown. We’re guiding to the end of next year for that. We are helping our customers move over now, and as they move over, there is a benefit.

Their reporting rate on units on 4G is three times what it is on 3G. It gives more opportunity to use things like video technology, which requires higher bandwidth. The latency is lower, the coverage is much better, and it really sets them up for the future.

It’s a real opportunity because it immediately modernizes the technology in the vehicle. In doing that, it allows us to provide more functionality. The way I would liken it is we are taking away their old Blackberries and giving them new smartphones.

With 4G you can really leverage video technology. Customers don’t want to look at eight hours of dash cam video or a camera on the driver. What they really want to see is where there are issues, or, even better, whether those issues will happen if behavior doesn’t change.

It also allows us to exonerate drivers. This is a great benefit to drivers, and we’ve heard drivers give testimonials on how someone hit them from the side and tried to claim it wasn’t [the commercial driver’s] fault. We can show that they were, in fact, in the right.

FO: What will the transition to 5G look like, and how will it benefit the industry?

PM: Because our users are mobile, 5G, as it rolls out, brings a lot of opportunities to us. It’s easy to think of 5G as just faster and higher bandwidth, but there are other elements there.

For example, multi-access edge computing (MEC) would allow us to take on the heavy processing that you need on video. MEC brings technology resources closer to the end user. Data is processed and stored at the network’s edge, meaning it can significantly reduce latency by getting information closer to the vehicle to have more of an immediate impact.

You’re looking at a stream of video and applying it to really high-end artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to figure out what’s going on. While the human mind can determine that a vehicle coming around the other side of a bend is normal, you have to train a computer to understand that is not something that is going to hit you. Rather than offload that into the cloud, where right now all the heavy-duty processors are, 5G and MEC, in particular, will allow us to do that on the edge of the network and give the feedback to the driver. There is no point in telling the driver a week later that they had a near-miss a week ago. You want them to know right away so they modify their behavior immediately.

So, 5G will help there, and it opens up other possibilities. As fleets are trying to be more efficient, 5G might be able to help them determine what jobs they don’t have to go to straight away. They can use augmented reality to have a customer show them where an issue is. Our customers will tell us the cheapest mile is the one you never drove. We see 5G being able to help us accelerate some of those technologies.

FO: How is Verizon Connect developing solutions for electric vehicle (EV) fleets?

PM: We see the early adopters are government agencies, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. As we spoke with our customers, our presumption was that their first challenge would be range anxiety. But the fleets who are adopting EVs now have gotten over that.

They want to use electric vehicles to boost their environmental credentials, and they also want their own customers to know that. They want us to be able to report out the equivalent of the amount of carbon that wasn’t put into the atmosphere as a result, as well as the cost savings.

For the groups who aren’t there yet, we are uniquely placed because we can see what their fleets are doing and the jobs they typically execute on. We could tell them which vehicles in their fleet could be electric vehicles right now and show them the cost savings compared to what they are spending on fuel.

FO: What is the state of connected vehicle technology today?

PM: The base level is GPS, accelerometer information, and information from the ECM, and from that, you can distill a lot of information. But as you add in the other technologies, the connected vehicle gives you this lovely context. We used to say that the truck is the truth because when the vehicle is at the job you know that the driver is at the job. But now we stay with the driver when they are not at the job. We help them with the planning, efficient routing, and much smarter scheduling, but you need that connected vehicle information to give the context.

Now that we know who’s driving the vehicle and where the vehicle is, we can get customer feedback from the job information. Fleets can tell not just who the nearest driver is, but which particular driver the customer really loves working with from that job information.

FO: Where do you see connected vehicle technology in the next decade?

PM: 5G opens possibilities with OEMs starting to build some of this technology into their vehicles. The industry has never had it so good in terms of available bandwidth. Now that data costs are coming down and bandwidth is going up, it opens up opportunities for things like video, asset tracking, and having that vehicle as an ecosystem and as a hub.

We believe that over time, interoperability is important with our products. We would like to get to a point where when we see an issue happening over video, we use intelligence to pick the closest and the most appropriate technician, automate the whole thing, get help to a technician that needs it, and still be able to help the customer.

FO: What must happen to make this future a reality?

PM: The networks need to continue to develop, and they are. AI and the processing required for it needs to continue to develop because that allows us to go from knowing what happened in the past, to what is happening, to what’s going to happen if you don’t change trajectory.

On the regulatory side, data privacy and ensuring AI is used the right way is really important. Customer data is precious, but it’s perilous if it’s in the wrong hands. It’s like molten gold—you can make some incredible things out of it, but you can get burned very quickly from it if you don’t treat it the way it should be, and our customers and their customers are more mindful of that than ever.

As we expand, there are a lot of technologies that we will interact with down the line. One of the things that we have been doing at Connect is opening up our platform more so that we can accelerate through partnerships with a secure and open API system that allows our customers to have this really well-orchestrated operation at the field rather than deal with siloes of information.

It’s a very exciting time, and our users are becoming more and more educated all the time. Our customers are rapidly embracing technology and being able to predict what is going to happen is increasingly in demand.