Over strenuous objections from the Transportation Department, the Federal Communications Commission endorsed a proposal Thursday to use a chunk of airwaves long dedicated to technology that would allow cars and trucks to communicate with each other, warning of danger, to instead be used to provide better WiFi.
In the meantime, the use of wireless Internet boomed and networking companies have been hungrily eyeing the block of apparently fallow spectrum.
The idea has divided two top Trump administration appointees, setting FCC Chairman Ajit Pai against Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and each of them is backed by broad coalitions of lawmakers and interest groups. The battle pits the potential for emerging technology that enhances drivers’ own abilities to avert crashes, and that could ultimately make self-driving cars safer, against Internet users’ seemingly unceasing appetite for faster wireless downloads.
Before casting his vote Thursday, Pai said it was clear to him that the original plan for the airwaves had not played out as his predecessors expected.
“A lot of people, including up here on this dais, are wondering whether this valuable spectrum, a public resource, is really being put to its best use,” he said. “In my view it is not.”
Pai repeatedly called his approach “balanced,” highlighting that it would still set aside some space for road safety technology, and emphasized other actions the FCC has taken to help make cars safer.
But that hasn’t stopped opponents of the idea from characterizing it as prioritizing download speeds for Netflix above the lives of road users. Chao herself recently made that case, if in somewhat less stark terms.
As Pai unveiled a draft of his proposal last month, Chao wrote to him citing the 37,000 fatalities on U.S. roads in 2017 and the 2.7 million injuries. Given those figures and the potential for vehicle-to-vehicle communication to help curb them, she wrote that it was “imperative” that the spectrum be retained for transportation uses.
Dividing the spectrum, Chao wrote, “to produce faster Internet streaming for infotainment is not commensurate with the significant national transportation public safety benefits that are being realized in the real world.”
Shortly after Thursday’s vote, the top national traffic safety agency posted new research on its website that found WiFi signals even in one part of the spectrum could interfere with safety messages beamed from cars, findings that could undercut the argument that the block of airwaves can safely be divided up.
The FCC proposal is not final. It will soon be published for the public to review and comment on, a step required before it can be put into force and that could lead to revisions.
At issue is wireless spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band. Two decades ago it was set aside for a technology called dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), which would effectively let vehicles talk to one another. Cars could issue warnings if their air bags had deployed, indicating they had been in a crash. School buses could tell approaching vehicles when children were getting out. The radars and cameras on self-driving cars could be boosted by the ability to get alerts even if danger was lurking round a bend.
But progress actually realizing that potential has been slow and was complicated further by a change in policy by the Trump administration.
In January 2017, the waning days of the Obama presidency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a proposal to require automakers to install DSRC radios in new vehicles.
After President Trump came into office, the proposal languished and Chao has said she would rather see the government take a technology-neutral approach, which would open the door to an alternative vehicle-to-vehicle communications system. That policy, though, would also need approval from the FCC.
In 2018, Toyota announced that it would nonetheless begin putting the radios in all Toyota and Lexus vehicles come 2021. That prompted a pair of FCC commissioners to write to the company’s chief executive, flagging the plans to change how the spectrum is used. That information, they wrote, is something “Toyota should keep in mind when committing capital expenditures to DSRC technology.”
And so, with the technology yet to reach the mainstream, the commission’s three Republican and two Democratic members said Thursday it was time to move forward with a different plan. In addition to giving some of the airwaves to WiFi, much of the rest would be dedicated to the alternative vehicle safety technology.
Michael O’Rielly, a Republican commissioner, hailed the vote as a “great victory” and said Internet companies would be able to use the new airwaves “to bring amazing technological innovation and capabilities forward, far exceeding anything we can imagine today.”
But road-safety advocates say they were imagining the potential to avert hundreds of thousands of crashes each year. Shailen Bhatt, the head of transportation technology group ITS America, said the technology is on the “verge of mass deployment.”
By changing course, Bhatt said, “You are basically condemning tens of thousands of people to die in traffic crashes.”