Friday 20 March, 2026
Smart mobility infrastructure has transformed from optional feature to operational necessity in under two decades. Today, it’s embedded in the product. In practice, a vehicle’s update cycles, digital services and increasingly its wider software-defined functionality depend on reliable connectivity. That change happened faster than the commercial and regulatory ecosystem around it. The technology works and the ambitions are large, but the architecture supporting them is still catching up. The Smart Mobility Summit at MWC Barcelona 2026 made that gap unusually visible.
The commercial stakes make the gap consequential. Puja Gupta heads strategy for the Connectivity Business Unit at Harman International, as she put it: “connectivity has really moved on from being an add-on, an optional feature, to being the fundamental fabric of how a vehicle is created, deployed and maintained over its life cycle.” Consequently, when connectivity underperforms, the experience begin to break down. That’s why operators, OEMs and infrastructure providers are no longer building services around mobility. They are increasingly shaping the infrastructure layer mobility now depends on.
The fragmentation problem in smart mobility infrastructure
The complication is that the infrastructure supporting those ambitions never fully accounted for them. Automotive OEMs sell into well over a hundred markets. However, the networks their vehicles depend on are governed nationally, operationally diverse and commercially unharmonised. As explained by Maxime Flament, Chief Technology Officer of the 5G Automotive Association: “automotive OEMs are not happy with only 40 or 50 countries where they can deploy connected vehicle services. They want seamless solutions, very easy access to global connectivity at the worldwide level for all end consumers.” That gap shapes every commercial decision an OEM makes.
Regulation makes the problem harder still. Marie Högberg is Head of Automotive at Telenor IoT. In her words, the modern vehicle has become “this more or less digital, super smart computer, part of critical digital infrastructure,” yet the frameworks governing it addressed a different object entirely. Telecom law, cybersecurity legislation, type approval requirements and data sovereignty rules all apply simultaneously. National governments administer most of them independently. Moreover, hardware decisions locked in at manufacture must hold across a fifteen-year lifecycle in jurisdictions that will keep diverging.
For connectivity providers, the demand from manufacturers is consistent. As explained by Andreas Schlufter, Director of Automotive Connectivity Innovation at Cubic3, “automakers are asking us to give them simplicity in this complex world, a single integration, a single operation team, and when it comes to billing, they want to see one invoice instead of working with all these technology partners.”
Multi-network connectivity as the new operational baseline
The industry’s response to fragmentation has a clear shape. Multi-network connectivity, combining cellular, satellite and private 5G, is emerging as the operational baseline for smart mobility infrastructure. Trevor Vieweg, Director of Global Business at Amazon LEO, was direct about why: “there’s no one network that’s going to be a solution for customers. Customers are going to want multiple networks for resiliency, for security, and just for performance.” The conversation has consequently moved on. The question is whether the industry can make transitions between these networks invisible to the user.
That question is considerably harder than the first. Gregory Ewert, Board Advisor at the HAPS Alliance, put the practical constraint directly: “you can’t be driving home on an autonomous vehicle and get a busy signal because it’s 5pm and the motorway is clogged up. That’s not going to work.” High-altitude platform systems sit between LEO satellites and terrestrial networks. They can offer latency characteristics closer to ground networks and help address coverage and resilience gaps. The point, ultimately, is that smart mobility infrastructure is not simply more connectivity. It is the coordinated operation of every available layer, with real-time intelligence routing and failing over as needed. Additionally, this multi-network logic has implications well beyond automotive, including cities, aviation and maritime, which face structurally similar challenges.
The business model challenge in smart mobility infrastructure
What remains less clear is how to pay for it. Investment in 5G rested on revenue streams tied to performance-critical applications. However, those revenues have not materialised at the expected scale. Tejas Rao leads the global network practice at Accenture. He was direct: “the promise of 5G was around low latency, and we didn’t really see an uptick on a lot of the use cases that really required that level.” The performance exists in the network. Nevertheless, the commercial architecture to monetise it consistently does not.
The city of Brownsville, Texas illustrates how differently the economics can work. Jorge Cardenas chose to build a private 5G network for the city rather than contract with commercial carriers. As Chief Information Officer of the City of Brownsville, he explained the rationale: “a city operates on tax money. It is very hard for us to partner with a cellular carrier and have a monthly bill.” Private infrastructure gave Brownsville the flexibility to connect patrol cars, fire trucks and city services where commercial coverage failed. Smart mobility infrastructure carries no universal economic model. Its value depends entirely on who deploys it and why.
The wider problem is that traffic-based pricing is reaching its limits. Users and OEMs want a single predictable plan, one that abstracts away the different network providers. Absorbing that complexity is a legitimate commercial service in itself. Furthermore, the industry has yet to develop arrangements that compensate it properly. That is a solvable problem, but it remains unsolved.
Sensing and AI in smart mobility infrastructure
The most consequential development in the space has little to do with faster data or wider coverage. Tiami Networks founder, Dr. Amitav Mukherjee, described a technology called ISAC, Integrated Sensing and Communications. It uses RF signals that 5G networks already broadcast to detect objects with no network connection at all. Vehicles, pedestrians, drones: every reflection off a surface carries information about speed, direction and position. With edge processing, those reflections become a real-time spatial intelligence layer. The long-term aim is to do this without new hardware build-out, using software upgrades on existing network infrastructure rather than cameras or optical sensors. Notably, cities have invested heavily in smart mobility infrastructure while remaining largely blind to what moves through it.
As Mukherjee put it, that creates “a safety risk, a barrier to improving services, and a shortfall when it comes to truly monetising mobility.” The ambition is to do this without major new infrastructure build-out, using networks operators already own. The technology is deployable today on existing 4G or 5G networks, with no construction required.
How ISAC changes the operator’s commercial position
The commercial implication is structural. Traditionally, operators provided the connectivity pipe and intelligence accrued to applications running on top. ISAC reverses that arrangement. The sensing data belongs exclusively to whoever owns the base station. As Mukherjee explained: “the sensing data you can collect using ISAC is exclusive to the operator. It’s not just selling new subscriptions. You have enormous amounts of data that you can ingest, process using AI, and monetise using sensing.”
AI accelerates all of this. Ajay Rane, Global Head of Telco Business Development and GTM Strategy at AWS, described the practical shift: “AI has completely transformed how enterprises and telcos are looking at innovation. The timelines are shrinking, the costs are shrinking, and now you can experiment faster.” Similarly, Luis Nadal, Mobility Solutions Manager at Telefonica Tech, made a related observation: “without having to deploy any additional hardware, we’re seeing additional use cases being created as we speak, just because we deployed AI models on top of what we already had.” The network is already more capable than the commercial models built around it. That gap is the real opportunity.
What’s next for smart mobility infrastructure?
Hongseok Cheon, Co-Founder and CEO of autonomous robotics company Twinny, put the foundational argument simply: “physical AI will not change the world if we cannot move. Mobility is not just a feature. It is the foundation.” The same logic applies to the infrastructure that mobility depends on. The vehicles exist. The networks exist. The sensing capability is deployable today. The industry must still work through regulatory harmonisation and shared accountability frameworks. It also needs commercial architectures that allow every piece to function as a coherent system. Right now, those pieces remain technically impressive but loosely connected. That is the actual problem – and one the mobile industry is well placed to help solve.
