Consultant Sees 'Ugly Fight' on 5.9 GHz Band
An “ugly fight” is likely, with resistance from the Transportation Department, as the FCC looks at sharing part of the 5.9 GHz band with Wi-Fi, CCG Consulting’s Doug Dawson blogged Monday. “Expect major filings by the transportation industry describing reasons…
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why taking away most of this spectrum is a bad idea,” Dawson wrote. Carriers may not make heavy use of the band, he said. “Recall a few years ago there was the opportunity for the cellular carriers to dip into the existing WiFi spectrum using [LTE-unlicensed] to offload busy cellular networks,” he said: “The carriers used LTE-U much less than anticipated by the WiFi industry, which had warned that cellular offload could overwhelm WiFi. It turns out the cellular carriers don’t like spectrum where they have to deal with unpredictable interference.” Commissioners approved an NPRM on the band 5-0 at their December meeting (see 1912120058). Had the FCC waited a few more years “the spectrum would have been full of millions of users -- Ford already announced plans to introduce the technology into their whole fleet by 2022,” Dawson told us: “Once a spectrum [band] becomes busy it’s much harder for the FCC to repurpose it.”