2/22 DOT Comments On Future of 5.9 GHz Band

New America's Open Technology Institute submitted comments at the Department of Transportation ("Department") responding to a request for comment on what the agency should do regarding the 5.9 GHz band and its impact on "vehicle-to-everything" services. OTI urged the Department to continue to seek a technology-neutral solution for the 5.9 GHz band to avoid policies that are limited to any one technology that may end up being outdated in the near future. OTI further argued that the Department should allocate the minimum amount of spectrum necessary to ensure public safety is protected, and then defer to the Federal Communications Commission to allocate the rest of the spectrum, which would follow the recent history of spectrum allocation. Finally, OTI highlighted the importance Wi-Fi plays to the U.S. economy and various industries. Available below is a summary of the comments:

The Open Technology Institute at New America ("OTI") is pleased to respond to the Department of Transportation ("Department") Request for Comment on V2X Communications. OTI applauds the Department for rethinking its approach to V2X safety signaling. Since 2013, OTI has actively participated in the Federal Communications Commission‘s still-pending 5 GHz rulemaking that proposed authorizing more intensive, shared use of the 5.9 GHz band by low-power unlicensed devices, a band that remains almost entirely unused after nearly two decades.

OTI strongly agrees that the Department‘s position on V2X communications in the 5.9 GHz band should be technology-neutral and market-driven. To clarify the Administration‘s commitment to a technology-neutral and more deregulatory approach, OTI urges the Department to officially abandon the DSRC mandate, which would be outdated long before it could be effective (15 to 20 or more years from now) and extraordinarily costly to implement. The steady trend toward vehicle connectivity as an application on emerging general purpose 5G mobile networks suggests that to the extent V2X radio communications is necessary for auto safety, it will be more rapidly and economically adopted as an application, or "slice," of those cellular networks. No separate network or technology mandate is necessary.

The Department should also cooperate with the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") to reconsider how much spectrum is needed for exclusive allocation to real-time road and vehicle safety signaling and whether, if Cellular V2X ("C-V2X") is the future of vehicle connectivity, some other band should be dedicated to serve that purpose. The European Union has continued to allocate 30 megahertz for V2X safety signaling, which is all that is necessary to successfully deploy real-time V2X safety applications even if DSRC and C-V2X are allowed to compete and potentially coexist on the band (as 5GAA has proposed for Europe).

Moreover, while the Department must certainly seek to ensure a sufficient amount of spectrum is available to achieve its goals for V2X safety signaling, it should also acknowledge that the FCC is the expert agency in the best position to determine the optimal allocation and balance between competing public interest communications goals. Today, 20 years after the allocation of the 5.9 GHz band for Intelligent Transportation Services that have never been deployed (and are now overtaken by general purpose networks and devices), the reality is the band has an immense economic and social value to virtually every American consumer and business as the spectrum bridge necessary to create wide contiguous channels necessary for gigabit-fast Wi-Fi. OTI therefore urges the Department to maintain an open mind with respect to relocating V2X safety communications to a band that may have both better propagation and better integration with the commercial 5G networks that are the future of car connectivity.

Since the entire 75 megahertz in the band is not needed to protect public safety, the Department should defer to core principles of modern spectrum management, principles the FCC has reiterated for more than 15 years, which maintain that exclusive allocations of this nature should be strictly limited to the amount of spectrum necessary to achieve the government‘s compelling public interest purpose. In this context, the public safety application is real-time V2X signaling, not auto industry use of the band for commercial or other purposes that could be achieved using shared spectrum. The Department should determine the number and size of spectrum channels necessary for real-time safety signaling and then defer to the FCC to allocate the appropriate spectrum, while ensuring an optimal use of the 5.9 GHz band.