Fifty-four automaker interests, state highway agencies, satellite companies, public safety groups, and others have sent a letter to President Obama responding to a letter that he was sent last week by two dozen tech and telecom entities, consumer groups, and school and library organizations urging him to push for shared use of the 5.9 gigahertz band between connected-vehicle and Wi-Fi applications (TRDaily, April 28).

“Last week, you received a letter from the cable industry and additional stakeholders suggesting that the transportation sector refuses to share the 5.9 GHz band used for connected vehicle technology with Wi-Fi. Nothing could be further from the truth,” said the most recent letter. “The transportation sector has been actively engaged with the Wi-Fi industry to determine the best method for robustly sharing the band while maintaining the integrity and reliability of previously permitted Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) systems and ensuring that the vast amount of resources already invested are not wasted. These efforts include the testing of at least two potential sharing solutions that the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration plan to assess this summer.

“We support spectrum sharing in areas where it is technically feasible and will preserve both life-saving DSRC technology and ensure the protection of the existing Fixed Satellite Service operations in the 5.9 GHz band,” the letter added. “In fact, the transportation and satellite industries have already successfully completed a sharing regime in this band reflecting our mutual commitment to operate our respective services on a non-interfering basis. At the urging of the Senate Commerce Committee, the FCC was directed to convene stakeholder sessions with all industry sectors in the relevant band and the appropriate federal agencies to work on a solution.

“Through such a multi-agency process, your Administration is moving toward that end, but is now being asked to delay action and revamp the DSRC rules and ecosystem,” the letter said. “Changing the DSRC rules and ecosystem at this late stage would be an enormous setback for highway safety and delay the deployment of DSRC, thereby significantly limiting the potential of this technology to reduce injuries and fatalities on our roads.”

“DSRC systems have moved from the test bed to the roadside, into vehicles and, based on recently-completed work, smartphones used by pedestrians,” the letter added. “Michigan is expanding the Ann Arbor Safety Pilot across its southeastern region to create a connected vehicle corridor. In San Francisco, 1,500 DSRC units are currently installed at intersections and on city buses to allow them to navigate through traffic with additional safety benefits. In lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a test bed is nearing completion that will use Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian DSRC transmissions to protect vehicle occupants and vulnerable pedestrians, such as highway workers. Additional DSRC systems for safety and mobility are being deployed in Tampa and in Wyoming. The New York Thruway is also using DSRC to ensure that freight vehicles are identified and using the highway legally and safely. Finally, General Motors will install and deploy DSRC technology in their production model year 2017 Cadillac CTS vehicles.”

Among those signing onto the letter were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Association of Global Automakers, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, AAA, the American Public Transportation Association, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Company, Honda North America, Inc., Intelsat Corp., the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the National Association of State Emergency Medical Officials, the National Sheriffs’ Association, SES Americom, Inc., and Toyota Motor North America.

“The auto industry is using safety as cover to grab a free spectrum windfall unrelated to safety,” responded Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, which signed onto last week’s letter. “Their letter ignores the fact that this unused band is big enough to deploy – and protect – both crash avoidance safety applications and next generation Wi-Fi that can enable faster and more affordable wireless Internet access in classrooms, public places and the connected home. Regulators in Europe have already decided that auto safety applications require at most 20 or 30 megahertz of the 75 megahertz of spectrum allocated here in the U.S. at 5.9 GHz.  A win-win outcome for consumers is clearly possible here if the White House forces DOT to work with FCC to share the band for both safety and broadband.”

“If the auto industry really cared about preventing the deaths of pedestrians and cyclists in auto accidents, then they would focus on deploying the existing unlicensed technologies … that they’re investing in now,” added Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge, which also signed onto last week’s letter. “This is shameless that these guys are … exploiting the pedestrian deaths as a means of squatting on spectrum.”

Instead, he added, they “could be investing in better and more modern technology.”

“Qualcomm supports the rapid, broad roll-out of DSRC and is a key supplier of chips for DSRC,” said Dean Brenner, SVP-government affairs for Qualcomm, Inc., which also signed onto last week’s letter and has proposed segmenting the 5.9 GHz band. “The key aspect of our proposal is that it enables the DSRC safety services to go forward without any delay by assigning 30 MHz of spectrum exclusively to DSRC.  That spectrum would not be shared at all, ensuring that critical safety messages would not subject to interference.  The proposal also asks that the remaining 45 MHz be made available for sharing but with top priority given to any DSRC non-safety service.” – Paul Kirby, paul.kirby@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily