Vodafone Business and Geely Technology Europe have expanded their partnership to include Mobile Private Networks, Cloud Connect, and Internet in the Car services – creating an end-to-end connectivity platform that spans R&D labs in Germany and Sweden all the way to production vehicles on European roads.
What the Partnership Covers
Geely Technology Europe (GTEU) is the European R&D arm of Geely Auto Group, responsible for developing vehicle architectures, digital platforms, and intelligent systems across its brands — including Zeekr. The organisation focuses heavily on equipping vehicles with the latest software, real-time data capabilities, and connected services, including dynamic EV charging planning and 3D lane guidance.
The extended agreement with Vodafone Business now spans three core service areas:
Mobile Private Networks (MPN): A dedicated, on-site private 5G network installed at Geely’s European facilities in Germany and Sweden, providing secure, high-throughput wireless connectivity purpose-built for vehicle testing and development workflows.
Cloud Connect: Secure data transfer infrastructure linking vehicles and on-premise systems to cloud environments, enabling centralised storage, analytics, and software lifecycle management.
Internet in the Car: Managed IoT connectivity powering in-vehicle internet services — including streaming media, navigation, and remote diagnostics — in more than 30 European countries.
Why Geely Needed a Private 5G Network
Modern automotive R&D generates volumes of data that public cellular networks simply cannot support reliably. A single test vehicle can produce terabytes of telemetry, sensor data, and video during a development session. Engineers need to capture, transmit, and analyse that data continuously, under controlled conditions, with no tolerance for latency spikes or bandwidth variability.
Public networks introduce two compounding problems: performance inconsistency, which breaks the repeatability that engineering tests depend on, and security exposure. Unreleased vehicle schematics, autonomous driving algorithms, and ADAS calibration data are highly sensitive intellectual property — not suitable for transit over shared infrastructure.
Vodafone’s Mobile Private Network at Geely’s European sites resolves both. The MPN acts as an isolated, on-site 5G environment that never touches consumer traffic, providing the deterministic performance and air-gapped security that R&D operations require. Processing happens at the edge — on-site — avoiding the latency overhead of routing data to and from remote data centres.
The Edge-to-Cloud Architecture
The MPN and cloud components are tightly integrated by design. The private network functions as the edge layer, capturing data directly from the test fleet and processing urgent workloads locally. That same network acts as a secure high-speed conduit into cloud infrastructure, where Geely’s engineering teams run machine learning models, large-scale telemetry analytics, simulations, and software version management across vehicle fleets.
This hybrid architecture reflects the broader pattern emerging across industrial private 5G deployments: localised edge compute for latency-sensitive operations, backed by cloud scale for computationally heavy tasks. In automotive R&D, that means a chassis dynamics test or an over-the-air update trial can execute at the edge with full fidelity, while the resulting datasets feed back into centralised AI training pipelines in the cloud.
Vodafone also provides broader enterprise connectivity across GTEU’s German and Swedish operations and its pan-European sales teams, making Vodafone the single connectivity partner across both R&D infrastructure and commercial operations.
From Lab to Road: IoT Connectivity for Production Vehicles
A distinct but strategically connected element of the deal extends Vodafone’s role from R&D infrastructure into the vehicles that leave the showroom. Through Vodafone’s global IoT connectivity platform — which currently manages over 240 million connections worldwide — GTEU’s production models receive managed connectivity for in-vehicle services across Europe.
The platform handles the operational complexity of international roaming, device management, and billing across more than 30 countries, removing that burden from Geely’s engineering teams. Local internet service providers are incorporated into the managed service, ensuring compliant, high-quality connectivity in each market.
One concrete example is Zeekr Navigation, where always-on connectivity enables instant in-vehicle customer feedback. That feedback loop shortens development cycles and improves Geely’s ability to identify issues and push improvements remotely — turning each connected vehicle into an active data source long after the sale.
Giovanni Lanfranchi, CEO at Geely Technology Europe, described the shift: “We’ve moved beyond simple transport solutions. Today, vehicles can be continuously improved through software, with data and connectivity enabling a more responsive and personalised user experience over time.”
Scale and Market Context
The commercial rationale behind Vodafone’s positioning here is significant. Industry projections suggest that by 2030, more than 98% of new passenger vehicles sold globally will be connected. That figure represents an enormous expansion in managed IoT connections, all of which require reliable, compliant, scalable connectivity infrastructure.
Fanan Henriques, Vodafone Business Product and International Business Director, framed it clearly: “As the adoption rate of electric vehicles continues to grow, the opportunities to enhance their safety, efficiency and the user experience through digital connectivity are significant. We’re supporting Geely’s growth in vehicle sales across Europe and its operations with a secure, multi-service digital infrastructure.”
By managing the connectivity continuum from R&D lab to production fleet, Vodafone creates a coherent supply chain advantage for Geely. Solutions proven in a controlled private network environment translate directly to the managed IoT service running in live vehicles, removing the friction of integrating multiple vendors across development and deployment stages.
TeckNexus Perspective
The Vodafone-Geely deal illustrates a pattern that TeckNexus has tracked across industrial verticals: private 5G is increasingly deployed not as a standalone technology experiment but as a foundational layer in a wider hybrid architecture, tightly coupled with cloud infrastructure and extending outward into field-deployed IoT fleets.
For the automotive sector specifically, this architecture resolves a structural tension. Vehicles are now essentially connected edge devices — generating and consuming data continuously — but the infrastructure to support their development and their operational lives has historically been fragmented across different vendors and network types. Consolidating both under a single private-5G-to-cloud-to-IoT stack, as Geely and Vodafone have done here, is a meaningful step toward treating the vehicle development pipeline and the post-sale connectivity layer as a single managed system.
With EV adoption accelerating across Europe and software-defined vehicle architectures becoming the norm, the demand for this kind of end-to-end connectivity platform will only grow. Automakers that invest in this infrastructure now are building a durable capability advantage — not just in development speed, but in their ability to continuously improve products in the field.
