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FCC Allocates More Bandwidth to Transportation
Ydeologi writes "MSNBC is running this story on the FCC finally getting around to allocating a more significant chunk of the airwaves for "intelligent transportation" services. "
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a light operated device available for emergency vehicles to get a favorable traffic signal?
Gee. I can't wait.
Stefan
First was the information superhighway, now we'll be hearing about superhighway information.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
they mention use as a credit card. personally, i dont favor the idea of broadcasting a credit card number over the airwaves.
just think if microsoft got in on this, all those M$ Car crashing everyday jokes...
icq:=22921393;
Antelope Freeway. One Quarter Mile.
Innit, a guy is testing out a new car; along with conversations you hear road signs "speaking" to him in the background.
Antelope Freeway. One Eigth Mile.
Cool stuff.
Antelope Freeway. One Sixteenth Mile.
Stefan
10. Thunderstorm in California; traffic slows down in NYC.
9. Forgot to go to the garage to get that new Service Pack.
8. Windshield is overtaken by a slew of porn site ads.
7. Incompatibility between your car's OS and the highway's OS.
6. Got distracted by all the pretty iCars.
5. That's what you get for running a beta!
4. Instead of the fancy car with all the extra options, you should have chosen that reliable, Open Source car...
3. Your car is highjacked by a script kiddie and driven into a ditch.
2. "What are you talking about? There's no Ctrl-Alt-Del in my car!"
And the #1 accident of the future...
1. It was a bad idea to advertise your new car on Slashdot...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That will allow telemetry data to be transmitted between cars. If the driver in front of you hits the brakes, your car can brake before you realize the need....Automatic caravans....digital CB radio.....Route/Alternate route allocation by amount of traffic and requests to travel between points
Injured software engineer wins against Mattel!
It works by transmitting a signal to a sensor built connected to the traffic light.
beam me up scotty!
In a lot of the sci-fi books I read, all space travel vehicles have some sort of automatic identification transmitter. (You learn of this when the ship is stolen and the transmitter is disabled.) This new allocation of frequencies sets the stage for this possibility becoming a reality far before space travel becomes common.
How long can it be before all cars will have transmitters built-in that can be set with the VIN and other data like license plate number? This data could be used instead of video or photo evidence now used to automatically identify cars violating laws such as not paying tolls etc. I imagine the data would be much easier to store and search through--and gather. This could definitely be a big privacy issue.
Unlike computers, you already need to have cars registered. It would be easy to alter the laws to require a transmitter as well as a license plate. I also think it could be quite easy to gather this data by deploying sensors at various places like intersections. Many intersections already have sensors to activate the light. Surely it would not be that costly to build a box to gather transmitted data.
Of course this could have benefits, hit and runs may be easier to trace, but imagine the government being able to have that information, and possible even sell that information. They can sell your information that they gather at the DMV why not this?
The biggest barrier is not cost of all the transmitters and receivers. That could be funded by selling data or by other automotive related fees. The biggest barrier will be standardization. It is unlikely that all 50 states will work together on such a system; they can't even work together on automated toll systems. But if some clever company made the product, it may well be able to market it to eager communities and states.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
Now our cars can transmit license & registration information so that when a cop points a radar gun at you, he doesn't have to pull you over. Just mails you a fine!
If you think about it, our nation's freeways and roads are dangerous as hell.
Everyday, on my way to work, I see an accident. That is just a gruesome facet of life.
In fact, injury is the leading cause of death for people aged 1 - 44 years. Over half of that (55%) is as a result of motor-vehicle accidents.
Motor-vehicle deaths affect Americans way more than fire-arm deaths, and yet it receives very little attention.
Will these new options on cars help? I certainly hope so.
Will the networked card run linux?
*ducks*
Imagine a beowulf clister of these babies!
*runs, hides behind tree*
Sorry, I had to...;-)
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
rf systems are ripe for hacking. most are insecure, as a lot of people just don't know about them. some of us do. you can bet that you'll be seeing a LOT of snafu's on RISKS involving this technology for quite some time after it is introduced. and one of these days fast food restaurants will get tired of rf hacks invading thier drive thru wireless systems. :)
This technology is really cool. With the right encryption, it would be workable for a lot of car devices. I look forward to the day when every automobile contains a camera mounted right behind the rearview mirror, looking out the front window of the car. Why? This is the best place to put a camera if you want universal (or nearly so) video coverage.
Yes, this is like 1984, but no it won't be an awful thing, because the cameras will be privately owned and controlled by the owners of the cars.
-owners will have complete control of the video
-owners will have the option of giving others access to their video
-if owners don't want anyone to use their camera, that's their right
-when you're in public, there are very few places where you're not in view of a car somewhere
-if you're being video taped all the time in public places, few will commit crimes.
-if the police hear about crimes, they can use the car cams that they have permission to use, and no others
-if you're at home in your living room, you're safe unless you park your car next to the TV.
Orwell wrote a good book, but the difference was that he wrote about cameras in a totalitarian society. We don't live in one of those, and cameras won't bring such a society about either. Take a look at who gets in trouble with cameras. When was the last time you saw your neighbor doing illegal things on film? Hardly ever. Instead, we've got plenty of examples of politicians getting in trouble with cameras. Think LAPD (Rodney King) or the Clinton aid caught with the hooker. Universal cameras be worse for politicians than for everyday people.
OK, and besides cameras in cars, I would like to have this technology used to provide web browser services in my car. On long drives my mind wanders a lot, and in the course of my thoughts I frequently come up with questions which the web certainly holds the answers to. It would be nice to have the luxury of instant gratification in those circumstances.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It seems pretty simple to me: Tracking vehicles. Not just tens or hundreds, but millions simultaneously. Oh, it'll be dressed up with some noble language like "It can help the tow truck find you when you break down" or "It can direct you away from traffic jams", but none of these things require the vehicle to broadcast data (and with the mandatory cellular location features, its position) all the time.
If you travel by bus or airline, your movements are easily tracked. Now we're looking at this being true for personal automobile travel as well. Surveillance society, here we come.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
anyone have any idea which frequencies are supposed to be allocated for this?
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
Do transporters (as in matter-to-energy converters) require FCC approval? Would that make the old contraption in every geek's garage illegal to operate? ;-)
The real root of our car problem is cheap fuel and sprawl development. In the long run, IVHS won't reduce accident rates or congestion anywhere near as effectively as a $10/gallon hike to the gas tax.
The frequency block allocated is 5.850 to 9.925 Gigahertz. That is 75MHz of spectrum. For comparison, the entire FM stereo block is just 20MHz. But at these high frequencies spectrum is cheaper. These frequencies also require more-or-less a clear line-of-sight for communication and the hardware to use it is more expensive. Such frequencies require GaAs RF components and are currently beyond the reach of cheap silicon MMIC (microwave monolithic ICs).
But this is going change with the ongoing improvements to silicon processes. Soon this band and the unlicensed NII band (National Information Infrastructure - 5.725-5.825 GHz) will be supported by cheap mass-produced high-integration silicon.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
A lot of posters here have so far raised some valid concerns, but as someone who is involved in the IVHS world (specifically electronic toll collection systems) I think I can say that this is a good thing for the FCC to do, and it helps the development of a technology that has already proven very beneficial.
Privacy concerns are common, but in every existing implementation of this sort of system legal safeguards are put in place. None of these systems can be used for speed enforcement purposes; in fact the only ticket you can get from a toll collection system is one for blowing through the toll with an expired account (or no account at all). These systems are also generally required by law to either provide a way of anonymizing the user or to provide a means of defeating the system (i.e. disable the tag so that the account isnt read if you're on a trip you want noone to keep a record of).
As far as the benefit and convenience, these things speak for themselves: ask anyone who uses E-ZPass on the East Coast, Florida SunPass, CalTrans' FasTrak, Atlanta's GA400 Cruise Card, and a host of others. Some states use a similar system for truckers, called PrePass, which uses transponders and weigh-in-motion scales built into the interstate to allow truckers to bypass weigh stations while still having their weight checked.
Some cities, such as Houston, use the transponders for the toll-collection systems in a secondary traffic-management role : antennas around the city monitor the flow of traffic and detect traffic jams and other problems by sampling the movement of the transponders. In this case, the account and other vehicle information isn't used, just the fact that vehicles are moving about is information enough.
Some models of radar detector can already read signals and warn of emergency vehicles and/or receive text messages sent by a portable roadside antenna; these can warn of traffic congestion problems, accidents, etc., and are another way of helping traffic flow. The biggest problem contributing to traffic jams stemming from accidents etc, is that by the time drivers know about a problem, they've gone too far to turn around or take an alternate route.
In short, traffic management systems using radio transmitters and other technologies are already in place in various locations. Steps like the FCC has taken will help all of these sytems standardize and become interoperable, which will help everyone on the road.
... or a bad one. If we have control over our own transmissions, if we have the ability to pass messages back and forth to one another without the state monitoring them, this new communications system has the capacity to be the best thing since the internet. In fact it will be an interesting subsection of the internet.
What we need to watch out for is technology with no off switch, no individual control, no anonymizing capability, and mandatory transmissions. If somebody can push a button and make your transponder trip (which is the current case with EZ Pass in NY), it's a bad thing because such technology can be defeated by criminals but honest people will be entangled by it since they won't be defeating it.
TML
Need I say more???
Sites that don't allow one to leave the place using the browser's back button (like this MSNBC site) deserve to be either slashdotted or boycotted, I'm not sure which. It's damn user-unfriendly site design.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
To get really paranoid:
It might be very simple to troll for cars that don't have transeivers/transmitters. You simply have a couple other devices that detect, say, the presence of a large amount of metal and a camera to take a snapshot of the liscence plate. This could easily be done at most intersections, where they already have sensors in place.
If you've removed the transmitter, you get a ticket in the mail a couple days later, and if that doesn't bare any fruit, then the police start looking for a car that matches the photo.
I could see this as a major plot device in a movie.
"There! There it is again! A phantam car! ...a ...Chandler MetalSmith ...Mark ...III, with no transmitter, and no autopilot signature! That thing's manual!"
-- "So far, I have not found the science" -Soul Coughing
Is there any evidence that all of this "new bandwidth" is going to eat away at the Amateur Radio Service?? Hams have not fared well politically lately, especially with the Internet's rise. :( Too many people are calling it a "dead art", when in fact it isn't.
What I've been reading about is satilite tracking systems that can turn any road into a turnpike! That's right, no toll booth needed, drive down this road and a bill gets mailed to your house. Beware!
Piggy-backing information on existing services -- without the receivers for the existing services receiving it -- is far from a trivial task. For example, there has been a push for quite some time to replace one of the AM sidebands with a second channel, thereby allowing stereo reception, but this has never happened. Why? Because all of the existing radios would balk at this. One cannot ask the country to scrap the millions and millions of radios that it has. Anyway, the article stated that the frequencies allocated would be in the gigahertz range where spectrum is cheap.
Nowhere did I see that the car would constantly broadcast information. A device to warn cars of ice on a bridge would broadcast a low-power signal that would only reach cars at a distance of, say, 500 feet. Nowhere does the car have to broadcast anything. Cars would only have to send information in case of an emergency or for "interactive" services. If your car was in a ditch, of course you would want to radio your location to the police. And once you got out of the ditch, there would be no need to continue sending your position.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
http://www.sorehands.com/injury Injured software engineer wins against Mattel!
You did enter 75MHz so it must've been a typo.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
I personally find the bumper stickers amusing and the problem they address important, but please excuse me if I don't see the wisdom in combatting a problem of others' driving while distracted by putting a bumper sticker on one's car. I often see idiots driving recklessly in order to get close enough to see what the bumper sticker says on the car ahead of them. Perhaps it'll inform more people than it hurts in this manner, but I remain skeptical.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It would be so easy for the authorities to use it for speed enforcement purposes, though. Put two gates on the road, a known distance apart. When any given car passes through both of them, you get two timestamps. Subtract the first from the second to get an elapsed-time figure. Divide by the distance between the gates (known) to get an average velocity. If this velocity is greater than the speed limit for the road (plus a little "slop" to guard against computational errors, say, 5 mph), issue the driver a ticket.
They do this now on turnpikes with multiple toll booths at different points on the road. Automated toll collection just makes it much easier.
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Be who you are...and be it in style!
now that you are required BY LAW to have the pass attached to your windshield when entering the toll plaza, any car with the velco visible will be targetted for a break-in. (New York City rules)
New car owner approaches her Saturn2000 car.
CAR: 'Please slide your ID card through, madam.'
Suddenly a red light blinks.
CAR: 'IQ Under 120 - Sorry, you'll have to take the bus.'
How do you spot a hacker in the year 2000? His car never gets the red light. Oh I'm looking forward to this.
In an industry mass producing things by the millions an extra 10 cents on the bill of materials can make a big difference.
The 902-928MHz unlicensed band is covered by cheap silicon because the cellular band is close enough. The silicon RF chips for the 1.8 GHz PCS band cannot be easily stretched to cover the 2.4GHz unlicensed band and it remains a little expensive to implement. Bluetooth will change that soon but 5GHz is still out of the range of cheap silicon.
(and yes, the 9 GHz upper limit was a typo...)
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
These automation systems are just cop-outs for a society unwilling to commit to a modern transportation infrastructure. In Detroit, we had an opportunity some decades ago to build a rail system; but people wanted to sell more cars. Then the city killed the trollies so GM could sell more buses.
Now, well, it would cost a _lot_ of money to retrofit all that stuff.
Serious economic opportunity for *someone* there. What part of west texas?
I can forsee a great potential for abuse here...
(regarding the toll booth thing, for example) Okay, assume you're not broadcasting a cc#, just an ID number.. What's to prevent someone copying that and running up charges on your account?
The fact is, that any system like this can be duplicated and abused, while it's in its infancy.. Look at all the fraud that has occured (and still occurs) with cell-phone theft.. It's not hard to see that the system is becoming available before the means to secure it.
Yes, it could be secure. Public-key cryptography could make a system secure by, for example, the toll-booth broadcasting a key out to encrypt with (just off the top of my head, so don't take it as fact or anything).. But how much do you want to bet that security has not been implemented to the point where you, or I, or Joe Cracker thinks it's secure?
Any system that involves automatic transfer of funds or services needs absolute security within unreasonable limits before I will adopt it. Plain and simple. By "unreasonable limits," I mean limits that are above and beyond my expectations. If there's a chance I could crack the system myself in under a month, I won't go for it. Forget it. I'll stick to cash, thanks.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
A system like this is already in place. I believe it is called "SWS" -- it is supported on most radar detectors.
* Enable ambulances approaching a stoplight to change it to green or prolong the green -- rather than having to run through a red light -- to minimize accidents.
How long until someone cracks this so they can get to work on time? I prefer the current system.. pull over when you see sirens.
* Allow car passes to become "wireless credit cards." Parking lot charges, gas fill-ups or even fast food from drive-throughs could all be billed to the same card, instead of the driver digging around for money to pay on site.
This is already available. Mobil has that thing you can stick in your window, and of course there is the iPass system. Personally, I prefer to have absolute control over my money.. I don't want things to be charged to my credit card unless I actually stick it in the machine. This automatic system doesn't really make things more convenient anyway. You are still going to have to wait for Burger King to put your food in a bag.. you are still going to have to get out of your car to pump your gas. Just seems silly to me.
* Warn drivers of collision dangers when approaching an intersection or railroad crossing.
As I said above, Radar dectectors with SWS already have this capability.
* Allow long-distance truckers to use the same transponder signaling device to communicate with authorities in each of the states they travel, eliminating time-consuming paperwork checks.
Ever heard of Citizen's Band aka CB? Channel 9 is for communicating with the authorities in emergencies. As for paperwork, I believe they also inspect and weigh the truck at this time, which is not a step I think is a good idea to skip.
Sort of related: GM has a 'concept car' of some sort that has a trackball in it instead of knobs, dials, and switches. You have to use it for everything except brakes and gas. Am I the only one who thinks this is a BAD IDEA?? I am all for computer technology improving cars but I am not for computer technology to obfuscate cars.
(regarding the toll booth thing, for example) Okay, assume you're not broadcasting a cc#, just an ID number.. What's to prevent someone copying that and running up charges on your account?
The fact is, that any system like this can be duplicated and abused, while it's in its infancy.. Look at all the fraud that has occured (and still occurs) with cell-phone theft.. It's not hard to see that the system is becoming available before the means to secure it.
The biggest obstacle is that the type of tags used in ETC systems are of the passive-backscatter variety. That is, they receive a signal from an antenna and reflect it back; the tag may or may not contain a battery depending on how much data it needs to insert into the signal, whether it supports a write capability, etc.
The point being, that it's not easy to read such a tag, since you need a fairly powerful (and very large and bulky) antenna to get any sort of range. If you were to try and sit on an overpass and sniff tags, you'd need a roughly 9-square-foot antenna and a hefty power source -- not very inconspicuous.
If you are lucky enough to be in an area that uses reprogrammable tags (tags whose ID can be changed), and manage to get hold of someone's tag ID and clone it, then you still run a pretty good risk of getting caught. The unlucky person who's tag you're cloning will probably notice the high charge on their statement and complain to the agency ; they'll flag the tag to automatically have an image captured every time it's used, and eventually you'll get caught.
All that risk and trouble to evade a 4-dollar toll? I don't think so...