Airbiquity Category: Telematics Service Official Site: Airbiquity.com Wikipedia: Airbiquity Address: Seattle, Washington Description: A connected car company founded in 1997 as Integrated Data Communications Inc. Page Sections: History · Article Index

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Airbiquity page on 18 October 2022, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Airbiquity Inc. is a business-to-business (B2B) software development and engineering company operating in the automotive telematics industry. Airbiquity's business model is to develop, deploy, and support the ongoing management of connected car programs for automotive industry customers.

Airbiquity's Choreo platform is claimed by the company to integrate the broad array of components needed to build and operate connected car programs such as mobile network connectivity; vehicle entertainment systems or "head units", cabin displays and instrumentation; telematics control units (TCU), on-board diagnostic dongles (OBD-II), smart-phone handsets; back-office IT systems; data analytics providers; software and firmware catalogs; emergency and concierge call centers; and content and service providers.

The company was founded in 1997 as Integrated Data Communications Inc. located on Bainbridge Island across the Puget Sound from Seattle. In 2000, the company changed its name to Airbiquity Inc. and later relocated to the Seattle downtown waterfront in 2006.

During its early years Airbiquity's primary product was aqLink, a patented in-band software modem enabling vehicle connectivity and two-way data transfer over cellular voice networks using embedded TCUs or consumer cell phones with Bluetooth connections. The introduction of aqLink was followed by a series of product upgrades and line extensions, including aqServer for transmission, receipt and processing of information transported to data and call center providers over UMTS, CDMA, TDMA or GSM wireless network voice channels.

In 2001, Airbiquity secured a contract with General Motors to license aqLink technology to support location-based communications for its OnStar service. Other automakers licensed aqLink technology for their connected car programs. According to Airbiquity, aqLink technology has been licensed for use in over 25 million production vehicles globally. The ability to provide voice and data services marked the start of branded connected car programs from automakers seeking to differentiate their vehicles from competitors. These programs have since expanded to include other features and services such as over-the-air (OTA) software and data management, infotainment delivery, remote vehicle management, electric vehicle management, and commercial fleet management.