DOT, FCC, NTIA Officials To Meet on Wi-Fi Sharing of 5.9 GHz Band
The FCC, NTIA and Department of Transportation plan to meet to discuss the future ​use of the 5.9 GHz band, a potentially important band for Wi-Fi, government officials confirm. The long-standing conflict is that the spectrum being looked at for unlicensed use, the 5850-5925 MHz band, has long been allocated to automakers for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) crash avoidance systems.
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The meeting is to include staff from the three agencies, as well from the auto industry and unlicensed advocates, industry and government officials said. They are expected to discuss the status of the various activities underway, officials said. The meeting had been scheduled for this week, but has been pushed back to a still-to-be-agreed-upon date, officials said. An industry lawyer said it's critical that DOT and the agencies are willing to come to the table together to talk.
Cisco, in cooperation with automakers, has been studying a “Listen, Detect and Avoid” protocol that would allow the sharing of the band between Wi-Fi and the V2V systems. DOT is expected to require its own testing (see 1402040029). Lawmakers have also been monitoring the issue, with meetings of their own (see 1505270044).
In January 2013, then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed the use of the 5.9 GHz band for WI-Fi and the fight has been ongoing since (see 1305310095). In September, Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Jessica Rosenworcel said they had been to Michigan to see the V2V systems firsthand and hoped a solution could be found quickly to open the spectrum for unlicensed use (see 1509160065).
Qualcomm has proposed a “slight reconfiguration” of the band that has gotten some industry support, said Richard Bennett, network architect and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It would slightly reduce the automotive allocation, but it would also protect it from sharing,” he said. “At the time that Qualcomm initially proposed it, the general reaction was that it was a good plan but too late to be adopted. As the collision-avoidance system has taken much longer to implement than anyone thought, perhaps the Qualcomm plan fits with a realistic deployment scenario after all.”
Given spectrum scarcity and growing demand, “it is imperative that multiple technologies share unlicensed spectrum,” said Roger Entner, analyst at Recon Analytics. “Anything else would stop progress and innovation in its steps and harm consumers. I think it will take time, especially because the current beneficiaries of the unlicensed spectrum would like to protect their free lunch as much as possible.”
FCC and the NTIA said in a news release Friday that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling had held the biannual meeting between the two agencies on spectrum. The agencies said that the two “affirmed their commitment to pursue expanded spectrum sharing between federal and nonfederal users to help reach and exceed this goal and, more broadly, to open up spectrum access opportunities for all users.”