Automakers Crossed a Line on 5.9 GHz Band, Public Knowledge's Feld Says

The auto industry hopes to push a decision about unlicensed use of the 5.9 MHz band to a later administration, Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld said Friday. Feld took aim at a letter automakers and others sent to the White House (see 1605050022). “Yesterday, the auto industry finally crossed a line on common decency that just pisses me off,” Feld wrote in a blog post. “It is one thing to claim that your technology saves lives and that if the FCC doesn’t do what you want, people will die. It is another thing to knowingly and deliberately invoke actual, real dead pedestrians and dead cyclists you know damned well your proposed technology could not conceivably save in an effort to support your own spectrum squatting.” The dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) system the auto industry wants to put in cars would replace the “actual existing collision avoidance system you are deploying today that would save cyclists and pedestrians,” namely car radar and sensing systems that use unlicensed spectrum, Feld said.