Latest / The 5G Podcast with Fexingo: Wireless Networks, Carriers, and Mobile Infrastructure / How 5G Is Quietly Transforming the Electric Vehicle Charging Industry
Transcript
- Lucas: You pull up to a public fast charger. You plug in. The screen says 'Initializing' for thirty seconds, then 'Payment Failed.' You unplug, try a different charger. Same thing. Now you've got twenty miles of range left and the nearest working charger is fifteen miles away. Luna: I've had that exact experience. It's the single biggest reason people tell me they're hesitant to go all-electric. Lucas: Right. And here's where 5G enters the picture in a way most people haven't thought about. We talk a lot about 5G enabling autonomous cars or streaming video in the back seat. But one of its most practical, immediate applications might be making EV charging actually work. Luna: Because right now, most public chargers rely on Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet, and they fail all the time. Lucas: Exactly. ChargePoint, which operates one of the largest charging networks in North America, started shipping its new DC fast chargers last year with integrated 5G modems. Not 4G, not Wi-Fi — 5G. Their engineering team told me that the primary driver wasn't speed. It was reliability. Luna: What's the failure rate they were seeing with Wi-Fi? Lucas: In their older units, about 12 percent of charging sessions failed due to connectivity issues. That's authentication drops, payment gateway timeouts, firmware update failures. With the 5G modems, that rate dropped below 2 percent in their initial field tests. And here's the key — 5G's 'ultra-reliable low-latency communication' profile, URLLC, is specifically designed for this kind of industrial control scenario. Luna: So it's not about streaming Netflix while you charge. It's about the charger being able to talk to the cloud without dropping the connection mid-session. Lucas: Exactly. And it gets more interesting when you think about grid integration. A single 350-kilowatt fast charger can draw as much power as several dozen homes. If a dozen of those chargers are active simultaneously, the local grid can get stressed. 5G network slicing allows the charging network to reserve a guaranteed bandwidth slice for critical grid-balancing communications, separate from consumer data traffic. Luna: That's the part I want to understand better. Walk me through how that works in practice. Lucas: So imagine a charging station in Bakersfield, California. In the summer, temperatures hit 110 degrees, and everyone's running air conditioning. The utility sends a signal saying, 'We need to reduce load by 10 percent in the next five minutes.' With a 5G network slice, that message gets priority over, say, someone watching YouTube in their car. The charging station's management system automatically throttles back the charging rate on all active sessions by 10 percent, or pauses one of the chargers entirely. The driver might see their charge time extend by four minutes, but the grid stays stable. Luna: And without that network slice, the message could get delayed or lost. Lucas: Exactly. The utility companies I've talked to say that's the difference between a manageable event and a brownout. Now, there's a concrete example from a pilot program ChargePoint ran with a regional utility in the Pacific Northwest. They instrumented 50 fast-charging stalls with 5G modems and connected them to the utility's demand-response system. Over a six-month period, the chargers participated in 14 load-shedding events. Total impact on drivers: average of three extra minutes per charging session. The utility avoided purchasing about 2 megawatts of peaker plant capacity. Luna: That's a real, quantifiable benefit. And it's not just about the grid. What about the charger hardware itself? I've heard stories of chargers being down for weeks because a software update failed over a flaky connection. Lucas: That's the predictive maintenance angle. With 5G, the charger can stream telemetry continuously — not just error codes, but temperatures, voltage ripple, connector wear. ChargePoint uses machine learning models in the cloud to detect patterns that precede a failure. For example, a certain connector temperature profile suggests the contact pins are degrading. The system flags it, and a technician is dispatched to replace the connector before it fails. Before 5G, those chargers were reporting telemetry only once a day over Wi-Fi. Now it's near real-time. Luna: How much does that reduce downtime? Lucas: One of their California stations saw a 40 percent reduction in monthly failure events after switching to 5G backhaul. And mean time to repair dropped from about 48 hours to under 6 hours, because the diagnostics are already done before the technician arrives. Luna: That's huge for the charging network operator's bottom line. But also for drivers. Knowing the charger is more likely to work builds confidence. Lucas: And confidence is the thing the industry says is the missing piece for mass adoption. Surveys consistently show that 'charging anxiety' — will the charger be working, will it be available — actually surpasses 'range anxiety' for many potential EV buyers. Luna: Totally. I mean, I know my car can go 300 miles on a charge. But I don't know if the charger at the rest stop is going to work. Lucas: So let's talk about a specific case that illustrates where this is heading. In Norway, which has one of the highest EV adoption rates globally, the national charging network operator Recharge has deployed 5G-connected chargers at 150 highway sites. They publish a real-time reliability score for each site. Before 5G, their average reliability was 94 percent. After switching, it's 99.6 percent. That extra 5.6 percent translates into thousands of fewer failed charging sessions per year. Luna: And that's across a whole country. The network effect is significant. Lucas: It also changes the economics. A charger that's down costs the operator lost revenue. A fast charger can generate 50 to 100 dollars per day in revenue. If it's down for two days a month, that's hundreds of dollars in lost income per charger. Multiply that across thousands of chargers, and the business case for upgrading to 5G modems becomes pretty clear. Luna: Okay, but there's a catch. Not every charging location has great 5G coverage. We're talking about chargers that are often in remote highway rest areas or urban parking garages with thick concrete. Lucas: That's a real issue. And it's why most charging networks are taking a hybrid approach. The ChargePoint unit I mentioned has both a 5G modem and a Wi-Fi radio. If the 5G signal is weak, it falls back to Wi-Fi. But they also use a technique called 'store and forward' — the charger queues up transactions locally and sends them when connectivity returns. The 5G simply makes that fallback scenario much rarer. Luna: And for underground garages, some operators are deploying small-cell 5G nodes right in the parking structure. Lucas: Exactly. There's a project in Chicago where a parking garage operator partnered with a neutral-host small-cell provider to blanket a six-level garage with 5G. The charging stations there now have guaranteed coverage, and the garage itself gets better cellular service for all phones. Win-win. Luna: You know, this conversation makes me think about how the adoption of 5G in charging infrastructure is sort of a quiet revolution. It's not flashy, but it solves really practical problems. Lucas: It's the kind of infrastructure improvement that, if it works well, nobody notices. You just plug in, it works, and you drive away. Luna: And if it doesn't work, you definitely notice. Lucas: Right. So getting this right is critical for the EV transition. And it's happening now, station by station. Luna: Hey, before we wrap up, I want to mention something. We keep this podcast ad-free, and that's possible because of listeners who support us directly. If you found today's episode useful — maybe it gave you a new angle to think about for your job or investment — and you want to help keep the show independent, you can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: And honestly, every little bit helps us keep digging into stories like this one. No pressure, just appreciation. Luna: Alright, back to it. So Lucas, what's next for 5G and EV charging? Are we going to see all new chargers ship with 5G from now on? Lucas: I think within three years, the majority of new DC fast chargers will have 5G as standard. The cost of the module has dropped below 50 dollars per unit, which is negligible compared to the 50,000-dollar cost of the charger itself. And the operational savings more than justify it. Luna: What about the software side? Is there any standardization happening? Lucas: Yes — the Open Charge Point Protocol, OCPP, is the standard that chargers use to talk to backend systems. The latest version, OCPP 2.1, includes profiles specifically designed to take advantage of 5G features like network slicing and edge computing. So the industry is building the software foundation in parallel. Luna: Edge computing — that's the other piece. Instead of sending all data to the cloud, you can process some locally near the charger. Lucas: Right. For example, authentication and payment authorization can happen at a local edge server with millisecond latency, rather than round-tripping to a cloud data center that might be hundreds of miles away. That makes the whole flow feel instantaneous to the driver. Luna: So it's not just about connectivity. It's about the architecture that 5G enables. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's the story we'll see repeat across a lot of industrial IoT use cases. 5G isn't just faster phones. It's a platform for making infrastructure smarter and more reliable. Luna: And in the case of EV charging, it might be the thing that finally makes the experience as seamless as filling up at a gas station. Lucas: That's the goal. And with the right connectivity, I think we'll get there sooner than most people expect. Luna: Great episode. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna.