"Hello taxi? Can you send me a car and make sure it's an Audi with MMH."
Jeremy Clarkson eat your heart out, we don’t want fast cars, we want connected cars.
The Audi A8 is the first production car in Europe to come complete with a mobile Wifi hotspot. We can picture it now; an Audi A8 sedately cruising down the street followed by crowds of geeks with iPads lured from Starbucks for a desperate Wifi fix on their walk home.
The latest Audi A8’s will launch with integrated Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity via a Marvell Mobile Hotspot (MMH).
The Marvell units are to be fitted by Harman Automotive who have integrated MMH technology into the A8 through a built-in WLAN module, which works with Wifi and Bluetooth, so even the most lowly mobile device should be able to connect. Up to eight devices can be supported, from Smartphones to high-performance tablets and other advanced mobile devices like Wifi enabled digital cameras, laptops and portable gaming devices.
Additionally Marvell’s Wifi software has been optimised for extremely low power consumption on battery-powered consumer electronics, enabling passengers to connect to the vehicle’s network without affecting the battery life of their connected devices. MMH technology provides a secure Internet connection with standard 802.11 WPA2 authentication and data encryption mechanisms.
The world of Telematics has been pretty stagnant these last few years however this marks a big step forward and one that will no doubt filter down to the rest of the motoring World. However what isn’t mentioned anywhere is the network or any mention of how much of the car’s battery power the module will use. we can see it now “Sorry honey I flattened the car battery surfing for porn clothes on Amazon”.
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