Auto Industry Crosses The Line on 5.9 GHz By Using Dead Pedestrians To Justify Spectrum Squatting.

[Commentary] For the last 3 years, the auto industry and the Department of Transportation (DoT) have been at war with the open spectrum community of 75 MHz of spectrum up at 5.9 GHz. I will save the longer history for an upcoming “Insanely Long Field Guide To the 5.9 GHz Proceeding” post. For now, it is enough to know that, as we enter the last few months of the Obama Administration, the auto industry and DoT have been doing everything they can to run out the clock and wait for this Federal Communications Commission to go away, hoping the next FCC will not be as interested in opening spectrum for sharing.

May 5, the auto industry finally crossed a line on common decency that just pisses me off. It is one thing to claim that your technology saves lives and that if the FCC doesn’t do what you want, people will die. It is another thing to knowingly and deliberately invoke actual, real dead pedestrians and dead cyclists you know damned well your proposed technology could not conceivably save in an effort to support your own spectrum squatting. It is even worse when the technology you are pushing, “dedicated short-range communication” (DSRC), would replace the actual existing collision avoidance system you are deploying today that would save cyclists and pedestrians — car radar and sensing systems that use unlicensed spectrum.

[Harold Feld is the senior vice president of Public Knowledge]