I think this whole thing is hilariously premature for a bunch of other reasons, but I assume a remote piloted car is gonna go REALLY slow until the car is confident again, and Google's cars are ridiculously limited in their geographic area. My guess is that they have sent a Verizon guy ("Can you hear me now? Good.") down each and every road they whitelist the cars to drive on.
This is a major reason for Google street view cars going everywhere, I would guess. Letting people look at street view in google maps is not the reason they have and continue to spend millions (billions?) on creating these detailed maps. Sort of like when Google had a free info phone service for a while to train their voice recognition system. I would not be surprised if street view goes away at some point.
a lot of people drive with van full of networking gear, telco companies checking their coverage maps, telco companies checking the competition maps, regulators checking coverage, consumer magazines checking coverage maps, regulators checking something else but seeing the coverage while doing it, mapping cars, etc.
my points are 1) running the roads scouring for GSM and wifi networks is nothing out of the ordinary 2) they would probably not even have to create a mission for that, and use or piggyback something else.
