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Comment by rwbt | Hacker News Reader

Automakers are hoarding the spectrum citing some pie in the sky safety stuff. Not a single car was ever shipped with that tech. I'd rather have my WiFi router running reliably rather than some promise ware hoarding it.

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To put some real numbers to this notion:

> But as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today said, "99.9943 percent of the 274 million registered vehicles on the road in the United States still don't have DSRC on-board units." Only 15,506 vehicles have been equipped with the technology, he said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/fcc-adds-45mhz-t...

Considering the American car market sells 17M+ cars annually this is bad progress after two decades.

Your wifi will never get any better. There is a limited amount of spectrum, and practically no one is aware that the channel bonding required to get higher bandwidth means there are just a few distinct channels even in 5GHz. So everyone keeps bonding channels, turning up the power, even though the best solution is for everyone to use 20Mhz slices at the lowest power possible. Then you add channel hopping and mesh networks soaking up even more lanes for intercommunication and here we are.

It's a great example of the tragedy of the commons.

The only hope for dense areas is transmitting in frequencies that don't go through walls and hard wiring each room with something close to line of sight radios integrated into light fixtures, but I'm not sure they've figured out the wiring for that.

Meanwhile my $10 CAT5e cable continues to chug along...

So true. Shannon seems to get lost in the noise (sic).

Cadillac shipped DSRC in the CTS sedan: https://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail....

Volkswagen is shipping DSRC in their latest Golf: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/volkswagen-new-golf-cars-...

"Automakers" aren't hoarding anything. If you read the cited links, the DOT is the one asking to retain the spectrum.

As for it not being used yet: that's because the technology wasn't there yet... The first trial was deployed in 2017. You're the guy declaring electric vehicles a failure in 1990 because battery technology wasn't ready yet.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5888501

https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis...

Then they should request the spectrum after the tech is available, not over a decade before.

I was an infosec contractor at DOT'S NHTSA while the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) workgroup was in it's begginings. I recall infosec leadership I respected being against it while short-term political appointees and key industry players like VW pushed it. Maybe we are better off without it?

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