AT&T, T-Mobile butt heads with Comcast, Wi-Fi in 5.9 GHz melee

The 5.9 GHz band is at the center of several fights as the Federal Communications Commission considers opening the band for Wi-Fi after years of the spectrum laying mostly fallow. The week of April 20, the FCC adopted a plan to make 1,200 megahertz of 6 GHz spectrum, which is next door to the 5.9 band, available for unlicensed use. That was considered a watershed moment for the Wi-Fi industry, and while that was a complicated proceeding, the 5.9 GHz band has been described as even more so. But, T-Mobile is urging the FCC to make the entire 5.850-5.925 GHz band available for licensed cellular Vehicle to Everything (C-V2X) technologies. It also suggests that because a significant amount of spectrum soon will be made available for unlicensed use via the 6 GHz band, there’s no need to reserve a portion of the 5.9 GHz band for unlicensed operations.  Reallocating C-V2X to a different band outside the 5.9 GHz range is “simply infeasible,” according to T-Mobile. “The commission should therefore preserve the 5.9 GHz band for automotive applications and reevaluate its proposal to allocate spectrum in the band for unlicensed operations.”AT&T agreed on that score, saying commenters in the docket “overwhelmingly” oppose the reallocation of the lower 45 MHz of the 5.9 GHz band to unlicensed operation because Wi-Fi is not its best and most efficient use.