This article is more than 1 year old
Telstra scores deal to drive data to Teslas
At last! The information superhighway comes to Australia
Australian buyers of the Tesla model S will become customers of the nation's dominant telco, Telstra, after the two companies announced a deal.
The Tesla S famously includes a 17-inch touch screen into which all sorts of data pours to power services like mapping and real-time traffic updates.
Telstra's mobile networks will be the exclusive carrier of that data.
The carrier is now talking itself up as a mighty fine machine-to-machine bit distributor – and information superhighway, if you will - thanks to the colossal footprint of its mobile networks and the many roads they blanket with electromagnetic goodness.
Scoring Tesla's business is undoubtedly a good win for for Telstra because it's hard to conceive of a higher-profile customer for telematics or machine-to-machine communications. Or, perhaps, a riskier one: if data doesn't flow well to Teslas on Australian roads, the Internet will know about it even faster than Teslas can accelerate. ®