FCC Urged to Seek Comment on Future of 5.9 GHz Band

The FCC needs to move forward on its stalled look at the 5.9 GHz band, a Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) event was told Tuesday. Chairman Ajit Pai was expected to circulate a Further NPRM on the band in May, but pulled it after Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao objected (see 1906180072). Among the options is sharing with Wi-Fi.

Spectrum is a “vital, valuable and limited resource,” said Deborah Collier, CAGW director-technology and telecom policy. “That’s why it’s so unusual for spectrum to be left unused for a long period.” That has been “the case for 20 years for a small, but critical piece of spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band,” she said.

Collier noted the FCC allocated 75 MHz in 1999 for dedicated short-range communications. Only two automakers are developing DSRC and one vehicle model has been deployed in the U.S., and that model is being retired, she said. Other technologies “have sprouted,” including lane-keeping, blind-spot information and automated parking technologies, she said. “To be fully effective, DSRC must be installed in every single automobile."

“This is a real opportunity for the FCC and an example of where doing nothing feels increasingly less like an option,” said Ian Adams, TechFreedom vice president-policy. The FCC needs to “start thinking seriously about this and having engineers ask serious questions,” he said. At a federal spectrum symposium Tuesday, a DOT official said the 5.9 GHz band must be preserved for safety applications (see 1909100063). “I am a little surprised that they have not moved forward, have not evolved their thinking,” Adams said. That could still happen, he said. “There’s such a diversity within the auto industry,” he said: “There are so many different bets and approaches” on technology. DOT didn’t comment.

Brad Templeton, technologist and autonomous vehicles expert, noted DSRC was designed in 1995-2000. “Are a lot of you using your 25-year-old cellphones?” he asked. DSRC is unlikely to take off because it will work only when it’s installed in most vehicles, and to succeed, tech has to be valuable to first adopters, he said.

For DOT, “it’s nice to own the band and say nobody else can do anything here,” Templeton said. “Who wouldn’t want that? The question is, is that the best choice of the broad question of what we do with all of their bands. … They’ve been working on [the band] for a long time. They’ve devoted a lot of effort to trying to see if they can solve safety problems with it.”

Austin Bonner of Harris Wiltshire noted the band is unusual -- essentially a government assignment in commercial spectrum controlled by the FCC. The first step by the commission could be an FNPRM putting all options on the table, she said: “That seems like that should be relatively straightforward.”

“Consumers will benefit most from both better auto safety and next generation, gigabit-fast Wi-Fi,” said Michael Calabrese, director of New America's Wireless Future Program. “Pai outlined the correct approach four months ago, which is a NPRM that refreshes the record and objectively considers how to actually put the 5.9 GHz band to use to enable both real-time auto safety signaling and the 5G capabilities that will be possible if more wide-channel unlicensed spectrum is unlocked for Wi-Fi 6.”

Vehicle-to-everything technology “is being deployed in more than 30 states and dozens of cities, and road operators have invested hundreds of millions of dollars,” emailed Shailen Bhatt, president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. “DOT has publicly said all seven channels of the 5.9 GHz spectrum are being used, so to say it’s being unused is simply not true.”