General Motors Company (GM) And AT&T Inc. (T) To Work On Connected Car

Something in common
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)had been in talks with GM in the past few months regarding a possible partnership. GM got really impressed with AT&T’s vision of having connected cars, which largely coincided with the idea that the automaker had built.

Phil Abram, Executive Director of GM, said, “AT&T’s vision with what we want to do with the connected vehicle was very highly aligned.”

The automaker was particularly amazed with AT&T’s ambitious plan of building its network infrastructure. The national wireless operator is expected to have coverage for about 300 million Americans by the time GM rolls out its LTE enabled vehicles.

Both Verizon and AT&T have been working hard to widen their service line beyond phones before the mobile market reaches a saturation point and growth slows down. In the past year, Verizon acquired Hughes Telematics for $612 million, sensing huge potential in this auto telematics business with great prospects for the connected car concept. The carmaker hasn’t commented as to why it is shifting from Verizon to AT&T, but said that Verizon would continue supporting the OnStar service for all vehicles that come to the market before 2015 models. Verizon hasn’t commented as yet.

Summing up
Other than offering 4G LTE connectivity through OnStar, AT&T and GM are closely coordinating to come up with other unique communication applications to increase the element of safety when driving. While the wireless service will help GM to increase sales by making an interesting offer as this, it would help AT&T in diversifying and adding another source of revenue in the highly competitive wireless market.

The article General Motors And AT&T To Work On Connected Car originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Rajesh Marwah.

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