House Lawmakers Seek To Broker Agreement on Upper 5 GHz Coordination, Testing

“It went well,” House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said last week. “It’s part of the learning curve for everybody -- it’s what are they doing now, how’s that [going] with the vehicle-to-vehicle sort of stuff, and I think it’s helpful. We had a productive meeting.” He called it a “good collaborative meeting” overall. Walden led a hearing on the 5 GHz band in November 2013.

The Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) of America is “strongly supportive” of the House’s efforts “to bring all of the relevant federal agencies together,” ITS Senior Vice President-Government and External Affairs Paul Feenstra told us, describing industry collaboration already underway to determine whether spectrum sharing is possible. “We feel we’re at about the five-yard line when it comes to deploying the technology.” ITS, whose members include automakers and other companies such as AT&T and Qualcomm, has met with Commerce staffers, he said. Cisco announced this month it’s beginning to test shared use of the spectrum, collaborating with automotive interests (see 1505070051), testing that Feenstra said is necessary given the dangers of spectrum interference for connected-vehicle technology: “How many missed signals is OK? When you have failure, people die.”

A GOP committee aide said lawmakers themselves attended last week’s meeting, calling it an initial gathering, with more government stakeholder meetings likely forthcoming. Representatives from the DOT, the FCC and NTIA were involved, aides from both parties said. One GOP committee aide compared the process to the Hill-convened collaborative meetings leading up to the AWS-3 spectrum auction, which involved regular meetings between government stakeholders and Hill staffers to facilitate the process. Last week’s meeting involved spectrum experts from the government agencies, the GOP aide said, saying the DOT was newer to the spectrum world and was getting to know the rest of the officials involved.

More Meetings Coming

The next step for House Commerce lawmakers and staffers is convening meetings with commercial players with stakes in the band, the GOP committee aide said, the timeline dependent on the schedules of staffers and availability of outside parties. The engineers should engage in real deliberations to determine what’s possible in U-NII-4, the harder band to address, with Hill staffers attempting to be honest, neutral brokers, the committee aide said.

Government stakeholders have noted the congressional attention. The DOT will be “developing an expedited test plan on interference with" vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) signals, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced May 13: “Members of Congress and the [FCC], which controls radio spectrum, have expressed interest in testing whether the 5.9GHz spectrum reserved for V2V communications can be ‘shared’ with unlicensed users. The Department is committing to complete a preliminary test plan within 12 months after industry makes production-ready devices available for testing.” The news received praise from the Association of Global Automakers.

The lawmakers pursuing such meetings, as outlined in April, are Walden, subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J. They “will examine the FCC and administration’s efforts to safely increase unlicensed access to the 5.9 GHz band without harming the existing work being done to improve auto safety through Intelligent Transportation Systems” and “hope to move forward in accelerating a solution,” they said in a joint statement then.

“The meeting was encouraging and there is hope that this will be the first of many meetings that will lead to more unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi while not interfering with efforts to improve driver safety,” said a Democratic House aide who attended the meeting.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, whose members include Cisco and Comcast, lauded the House-led effort. “It’s imperative that leaders from industry and government agencies collaborate and innovate to extract the most value from spectrum -- without compromising the automotive safety benefits envisioned for future vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure solutions,” Vice President-Marketing Kelly Davis-Felner said in a statement. “We have already communicated with Committee staff about the meetings, and stand ready to provide any additional insight or information required in the process.”

Looming Legislation

Eshoo co-sponsors the Wi-Fi Innovation Act (HR-821), which would compel the FCC to begin such testing of the upper 5 GHz band. Its Senate counterpart is S-424. “Not later than 6 months after the date of enactment of this Act, the Commission shall, in consultation with the Department of Transportation and the NTIA, develop and publish a test plan, including a timeline, for the use of unlicensed devices in the 5850–5925 MHz band,” its text said. Communications Subcommittee Vice Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, introduced the legislation this year and in the last Congress. Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., back a Senate companion, introduced in both this and the last Congress. Latta “was part of the meeting and is participating in the ongoing discussion,” confirmed Latta chief of staff Ryan Walker, who also attended. These meetings will help determine whether legislation such as the Wi-Fi Innovation Act is necessary or whether the government and industry stakeholders can resolve the issue on their own, the GOP committee aide said. Several automotive interests have blasted the legislation as unnecessary and “preemptive,” urging collaboration instead, and ITS’ Feenstra warned legislation may be “not necessary or helpful” and “we are there already” in terms of the collaboration it would mandate. The Wi-Fi Alliance has welcomed the Wi-Fi Innovation Act.

“The testing needs to run its course,” cautioned Randy Iwasaki, executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority in California. He has focused on connected-vehicle technology for years and repeatedly referred to its potential to reduce the number of traffic accidents. He's “absolutely” concerned about giving up the spectrum to other use if it’s not technically feasible, he said: “In the future, if you need it, it’s going to be very difficult to get it back.” Iwasaki mentioned a goal of “trying to brand this notion of ‘save our spectrum,’” praising the low latency of the upper 5 GHz band for intelligent transportation purposes.

“We routinely provide technical assistance and status reports to [congressional] members and staff on a variety of issues,” an FCC spokeswoman said, confirming that representatives from the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology, Office of Legislative Affairs and the office of the chairman attended this specific meeting. FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mike O’Rielly back the exploration of such use of the upper 5 GHz band, they said in a joint blog post in February and statement in April praising lawmakers for their desire to hold these meetings. Spokespersons for NTIA and the Department of Transportation declined to comment on last week’s meeting.

Feenstra also eyes the launch next week of a “vehicle-to-infrastructure” coalition, which will involve vehicles communicating not to other vehicles but using technology to communicate to such objects as traffic signals and phones. There’s “huge, huge potential,” Feenstra predicted, but emphasized the spectrum challenges that remain. “Everybody has a strong interest in exploring whether spectrum sharing can work in the 5.9 GHz band,” he said. “No one wants to slow that down.”