Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything Advocates Seen Gaining Ground Over DSRC
The new 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) is quietly working to build support among automakers for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technology, as an alternative to dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) in the 5.9 GHz band. Ford has been the leading auto company behind the C-V2X push, and others are interested, industry officials said. BMW Group and Daimler North America sent representatives to a January meeting at the FCC on behalf of the 5GAA. General Motors, in particular, remains a DSRC advocate.
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“The 5GAA/C-V2X cabal is not eager to speak openly, since they are trying to convince automakers to change horses,” said a Wi-Fi advocate. “Ford is on board, but some others remain adamant about DSRC.” Qualcomm, a leader of the 5GAA, featured C-V2X at its booth at CES in January (see 1801220024). The 5GAA didn’t comment.
A big advantage of DSRC is it's being deployed, said an Intelligent Transportation Society of America official. “ITS America is technology neutral but not safety neutral," President Shailen Bhatt told us. "It’s important to focus on what we can do to save lives now, rather than wait and delay deployment of life-saving technology like vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure DSRC, which has been tested and proven over the last several years.”
The Department of Transportation launched a rulemaking in the last days of the Obama administration proposing to require automakers to install vehicle-to-vehicle technologies in all cars and other light-duty vehicles (see 1612130050). The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs last year downgraded the status of the rulemaking (see 1711010047) to “undetermined.”
Industry officials said DOT Secretary Elaine Chao is signaling the department won’t push DSRC over other technologies. “The department will not be in the business of picking winners or losers, or favoring one form of technology over another,” Chao said in a January speech at the Detroit Auto Show.
IEEE 802.11p, the standard that allows for DSRC, “is kind of a mess,” said Roger Lanctot, Strategy Analytics director-automotive connected mobility: “The C-V2X side is pretty straightforward.” DSRC “isn’t necessarily some kind of slam dunk, no brainer,” Lanctot told us. “It’s not as some of its advocates say ‘ready to go.’”
GM officials were surprised other automakers haven’t followed its example and adopted DSRC for any of their vehicle models, Lanctot said. “Even GM is not exactly giving an enthusiastic embrace when they put it on their lowest volume vehicle, the [Cadillac] CTS, a vehicle that’s seeing declining volume from an already low level,” he said. “Here’s your biggest advocate in the marketplace with what only can be described as a half-hearted gesture.” GM didn’t comment.
5G Americas said in a white paper Wednesday that C-V2X is key to automated vehicles. DSRC has weaknesses, including that it would require installation of tens of thousands of dedicated roadside units, while C-V2X uses existing carrier networks. “There is no apparent path for continued evolution of the radio standard to meet changing technological and consumer needs,” 5G Americas said of DSRC. “As it was designed for rapid transmission of short-range basic safety messages, it is unable to meet the higher bandwidth demands of … applications such as autonomous driving, multimedia services. DSRC also doesn’t have the bandwidth necessary to transmit the raw vehicle sensor data that will become increasingly common in automated vehicles.”
It’s clear there will be no DOT mandate and “therefore probably no major deployment of DSRC,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America. “Since the mobile industry is starting from scratch on cellular V2X, the FCC should take a fresh look at the best spectrum for this purpose. If safety signaling will ultimately use general purpose 5G networks, that could be on spectrum with better propagation, adjacent to cellular bands, allowing wider channels for Wi-Fi in the upper 5 GHz band.” New America will host of discussion of the band Friday.
“I am hardly surprised that there are folks interested in a range of technologies” but it would take an FCC rule change to allow C-V2X to operate in the 5.9 GHz band, said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge. “Meanwhile, here we are over a year after the FCC was supposed to have completed testing on sharing with unlicensed, as well as a year and a half after Public Knowledge submitted its petition for rulemaking to address the privacy, cybersecurity and commercialization problems in the band. It would be nice if Chairman [Ajit] Pai would give this mater the attention it deserves.” The FCC didn’t comment.
“Government regulations should remain technology and vendor neutral,” said Deborah Collier, director-technology and telecommunications policy at Citizens Against Government Waste. “We continue to believe that DSRC is an outdated mode of vehicle-to-vehicle communications that has only been installed in one vehicle model currently on the market. The government should not mandate a specific technology, when there are other technologies in development by manufacturers that may work as well as or even better than the DSRC.”