Toyota to ‘Pause’ DSRC, Cites Poor Industry Participation, 5.9 GHz Band ‘Risk’

A year after Toyota announced it would introduce dedicated short-range communications systems on vehicles sold in the U.S. starting in 2021 (see 1805110014), the automaker decided to “pause its deployment,” it told the FCC, posted Monday in docket 13-49. Though there continues to be “general excitement about DSRC and the benefits of widespread deployment among key stakeholders,” Toyota hasn’t seen “significant production commitments from other automakers.” The “cooperative safety benefits” won't “be fully realized without greater automotive industry commitment to deploy the technology,” it said. Toyota expressed confidence a year ago that the FCC “would implement a sharing mechanism for unlicensed operations in the 5.9 GHz band only if testing fully validated that such operations could safely occur in the band and not disrupt the current or future deployment of DSRC technology by existing licensees,” it said. But the “regulatory environment” for the 5.9 GHz band since has become “even more uncertain and unstable,” it said. In addition to the “long-standing pending proceeding” involving unlicensed operation in the band, the agency recently launched a second proceeding to explore “reallocating channels away from DSRC” to cellular vehicle to everything technology, it said. “The chance that DSRC operations could be subject to harmful interference from unlicensed operations or other technologies should they be permitted in the band, that channels used for DSRC could be reallocated after services using those channels have entered the market, or that spectrally-inefficient band fragmentation could impair the ability to expand DSRC services and applications over time creates a substantial and arguably insurmountable risk.”