White House Said Still Reviewing DOT Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Proposal

Michael Calabrese was quoted in Communications Daily on a White House review of a mandated vehicle-to-vehicle wireless radio safety network: 

Office of Management and Budget review of a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NPRM on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) systems is complicating FCC progress on the 5.9 GHz band, industry officials said. The White House’s pending decision on a V2V mandate put the FCC majority in a bind, officials said. The commission is examining sharing between Wi-Fi and dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) systems aimed at curbing traffic accidents (see 1608010044).

Democratic commissioners seem to be “holding back” on 5.9 GHz to see how the White House re­solves the Department of Transportation’s proposed V2V mandate, said Michael Calabrese, director of theWireless Future Program at New America. “The review has been really long prolonged” and was originally supposed to be completed in spring, Calabrese told us.

“There’s been a debate in the White House” on V2V and “whether a mandate makes any sense given the trajectory of driver-assist technologies and autonomous cars,” Calabrese said. “NHTSA says it will not even know if DSRC is effective enough for safety for about 20 years, since the effectiveness of DSRC depends on nearly all other vehicles using it.” The White House could approve the V2V mandate, but also require DOT to limit its prioritized or exclusive use of the 75 MHz band to the spectrum required for V2V and other real-time safety applications, Calabrese said. Qualcomm and other advocates for unlicensed have argued that 20 or 30 MHz should be set aside exclusively for auto safety at the top of the 5.9 GHz band, an approach that would allow the 10 MHz channel used for V2V signaling to move from the bottom to the top of the band, he said.