The world will soon see 5G emerge as a blend of pre-existing technologies such as 2G, 3G, 4G and wi-fi to allow higher network coverage, availability and density.

With its key differentiator being greater connectivity, 5G will act as an enabler for autonomous vehicles, machine-to-machine and machine-to-infrastructure services, and the Internet of Things.

It will also penetrate the over-the-air (OTA) updates space as level 3 or 4 automation requires a massive amount of data processing to occur in real time. Through 5G, the OTA updates space will be able to improve the customer experience and save on recall spending.

These are some of the key findings from a new piece of analysis from Frost & Sullivan, The Global Advent of 5G in Cars. The study forecasts that Asian countries such as S. Korea and Japan will be the market leaders in commercializing 5G, edging out their US and European counterparts. With the penetration of long-term evolution (LTE) connections being fairly strong across Asian countries – close to 63 per cent in S. Korea and 44 per cent in Japan – the available infrastructure can easily support 5G.

Major service providers expect to deploy a pilot project at the Tokyo Olympics in 2016 and the FIFA World Cup in Russia in 2018. Meanwhile, Asian service providers such as NTT DoCoMo, Huawei and SKT have entered various partnerships to set up trials for 5G in various bandwidths and identify its potential.

“The biggest challenge for network service providers is to enable 5G to provide end-to-end coverage and achieve latency less than one millisecond,” said Frost & Sullivan Automotive & Transportation senior research analyst,Ramnath Eswaravadivoo. “As such, network service providers have their work cut out to live up to 5G’s promise – the seamless extension of services and coverage anywhere, anytime, regardless of whether the user is in a dense area like a stadium/city centre or in a village/high-speed train.”

While highly-automated cars are expected to commercialize only by 2020, 5G will be the driving force behind vehicle applications involving machine learning, brake/steering, ECU integration, highly accurate GPS, and sensor fusion. 5G will also facilitate wearable devices such as smart glasses and smart watches, and help make augmented reality and virtual reality mainstream features in cars.

There’s more information about the report here.