Court rules FCC is allowed to reassign 5.9 GHz bandwidth, killing V2X
Enlarge / Technologists think that allowing cars to communicate with each other could eradicate traffic collisions. (credit: metamorworks/Getty Images)
The long-running saga of V2X (vehicle to everything), a system that uses part of the wireless spectrum to allow vehicles to communicate with our road infrastructure and each other, appears to finally be over. On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the Federal Communications Commission can go through with its plan to free up part of the spectrum previously set aside for vehicles and infrastructure to talk to each other. Instead, that bandwidth will be turned over to Wi-Fi instead.
The FCC set aside the 5.9 GHz band for V2X back in 1999. A communications protocol that vehicles could use to alert each other to dangers sounded like a great idea at the time, and the plan was to use dedicated short-range radio communication (DSRC) wireless to power the system.
Originally, the technology was meant to be fitted just to vehicles, but engineers got ambitious and decided that instead of just V2V, vehicles should be able to talk to things like traffic lights as well. This would lead us to a traffic utopia, where congestion and crashes are things of the past. There was even thought given to making pedestrians dependent on DSRC to avoid being flattened by speeding cars.