The 29 countries that signed a Letter of Intent signed on Digital Day 2017 agreed to designate digital cross-border corridors, where vehicles can physically move across borders and where cross-border road safety, data access, data quality and reliability, connectivity and digital technologies can be tested and demonstrated.
Pan-EU 5G corridors
The European Commission’s ambition is to focus on these corridors in future EU automated-driving projects, when devising digital policies, which includes cybersecurity, privacy, 5G, the Internet of Things, the data economy, the free flow of data, etc.
The EC and Member States have agreed on 8 Pan-EU 5G corridors so far.
Under the European 5G vertical strategy, Connected and Automated Driving (CAD) is considered as a flagship use case for 5G deployment along European transport routes, with a view to creating complete ecosystems around vehicles, beyond the safety services targeted by the Cooperative-Intelligent Transport System (CITS) roadmap of Europe.
This has led to a high-level agreement between the EC and Member States at the ministerial level, with Member States agreeing to make pan European corridors available to test 5G technology for vehicular applications.
These corridors initially included:
- Metz-Merzig-Luxembourg (France, Germany, Luxembourg)
- Rotterdam-Antwerp-Eindhoven (Netherlands, Belgium, Netherlands)
- Porto-Vigo and Merida-Evora (corridor Lisbon – Madrid),
- the E8 “Aurora Borealis” corridor between Tromsø (Norway) and Oulu (Finland) and
- the “Nordic Way” between Sweden, Finland and Norway
These corridors were expanded on EC Digital Day in April 2018, with announcements to work on developing corridors between:
The 5G corridors make Europe the largest trial area for 5G technology rollouts.
