GM Pulled RTT Waiver After Deciding It's Not Necessary; Cruise AV Tests Continue
General Motors decided to ask the FCC to pull the company's waiver bid to not provide some real-time texting functions (see 1904250038) after deciding it wasn't necessary, GM confirmed Friday. The company's Cruise shared autonomous vehicles that continue being tested in three big cities lack some features that would have subjected them to the RTT rules, in this view.
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The theory is shared by some disabilities groups initially concerned with the automaker's request. Some say the ambiguity that prompted the company to make the late-2018 request might eventually need clearing up by the commission. The regulator declined comment Thursday, when GM asked to pull its request, and didn't comment now.
After seeking the waiver, GM determined it wasn't needed, its spokesperson said in an interview Friday. The telematics system for Cruise AVs isn't capable of directly calling someone using the public phone network, he confirmed. When the system is paired with a smartphone, it could make such calls, including to 911, he noted.
The GM service would let those in the self-driving autos meant for shared rides call customer service and not other parties directly. So it's not an interconnected service since it doesn’t reach the public switched telephone network and there’s no reason one would want to make it work with a text telephone device, said the spokesperson and experts including University of Colorado-Boulder law school Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic Director Blake Reid.
A user couldn't directly call 911 or any other number using only the system and not another device, so it’s not subject to rules that would in other cases require RTT, Reid said in an interview Thursday night: This has RTT-like functions only with customer service. GM said Thursday RTT rules don't apply to Cruise AVs being tested "because the vehicles will offer a non-interoperable, non-interconnected telematics service rather than interoperable, interconnected communication."
Gallaudet University's Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technology for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc. and about a dozen other groups are "pleased that GM chose to withdraw the petition," Reid emailed. "As our comment [here] explained, we are in general concerned about the need for non-interconnected voice services to be provided with RTT functionality."
Current "rules are focused on the unique dimensions of interconnected RTT services, and whatever precedent might have been set by the Commission ruling on the petition could have led to significant confusion about the application of those rules to non-interconnected services," Reid added. "While we hope that the Commission will address in the near future the important issues around the provision of non-interconnected RTT services, this was not an ideal context," emailed Reid, whose group represents TDI. "We also appreciate the work that GM is undertaking to make its ride-hailing service accessible to passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing by providing RTT functionality consistent with the Commission’s existing accessibility rules for non-interconnected advanced communications services."
The company is testing the Cruise AVs in the Detroit, Phoenix and San Francisco markets, its spokesperson said. "We're making progress" on such tests, he said, saying the company isn't publicly estimating when or where it might launch such ride-sharing. "We're on track for commercialization, with safety the gating metric."