By: Marc Prioleau
Today we announced that we are providing Sprint with a new generation of mapping and location services for their Curiosity 5G IoT network that truly takes the concept of the Live Map to the next level.
The 5G Curiosity network is built from the ground up for massive deployment of remote sensors interacting with the network and each other with super high bandwidth, extreme low latency, and precise location. Rather than adapting the existing voice and data infrastructure to the rapidly growing IoT world, Sprint is deploying a new architecture aimed at allowing developers to build unique new services.
Mapping on 5G IoT networks is going to be wild.
If you follow Mapbox, you know we’re all about the “Live Map” — basically a map built from feedback from hundreds of millions of sensors, which are processed to understand a live picture of the world, then fed back into an up-to-date map and sent out so people and machines have a picture of the world as it is now, not the way it was 12 months ago when a couple folks in a van surveyed it. We collect over 250M miles of anonymized telemetry each day that tells us how things move around. Since we launched the Vision SDK we’ve been using computer vision and on-device neural nets to get richer content about the real-time world.
Now, take that concept and think about it in Sprint’s 5G Curiosity environment:
- IoT means that we can connect more devices of all kinds to the network with less friction and lower cost. These connected, location-aware “things” give us signal on conditions in the real world. The more of them, the more signal available.
- Massive bandwidth at the edge means that we can start pulling in richer content that describes the physical world in more detail. Think video and point clouds that depict 3D representations of the environment.
- Computing at the edge means that we shorten the distance between data capture and the machine learning processes which turns that data into intelligence about what the world looks like. That means we reduce the time it takes to detect, understand, characterize and remap the world and, more importantly, reduces the time to give people and machines direction on how to move around the world.
Everything we have been working on with the Live Map gets accelerated with 5G. The impact is going to be amazing. The Sprint team is leaning forward with us to make this happen. The Curiosity network is built for developers. We’re looking forward to working with Sprint to put new tools in the hands of those developers and seeing what happens.
More to come. Stay tuned.
Sprint and Mapbox launch Live Maps on Curiosity IoT Platform was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.