An industry group calling itself 5G Americas has published a whitepaper that touts the advantages of a smart auto grid powered by 5G and the C-V2X technology. This technology is the car connectivity standard that much of the industry has gelled around, replacing the older DSRC standard.

Over a decade ago, the FCC became so enamored over the idea of self-driving cars that the agency dedicated the 5.9 GHz spectrum band for the sole use of smart cars. The picture painted to the FCC at the time was the creation of a 5G network along roadways that would communicate with self-driving cars. As engineers experimented with smart cars, they quickly came to understand that the time lag involved in making real-time driving decisions in the 5G cloud was never going to be fast enough for the split-second decisions we constantly make while driving. Last year, the FCC halved the amount of bandwidth available for smart cars but didn’t totally kill the spectrum.

This whitepaper still envisions that the concept of a ubiquitous wireless network supporting smart cars. It’s not entirely surprising when looking at the companies that make up 5G Americas – AT&T, Ciena, Cisco, Crown Castle, Ericsson, Intel, Liberty Latin America, Mavenir, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Shaw Communications, T-Mobile, Telefónica, VMware and WOM. These companies would stand to make a lot of money on the idea if they could talk the government into funding the needed wireless network along roads.

There are still some interesting ideas suggested by the whitepaper. There are a lot of benefits to car-to-car communications. A car can be alerted when a neighboring car wants to change lanes or wants to pass. Drivers could peek into a camera of the car in front of them before trying to pass. Drivers can be alerted about a host of hazards, such as a car running a red light or patches of ice on the road ahead.

Most cars today already include a lot of safety features that weren’t imagined twenty years ago and the benefits envisioned by C-V2X technology sound like the next generation of safety features that car manufacturers are likely to embrace.

But this whitepaper doesn’t give up on a wireless network positioned along roads to communicate with vehicles. It refers to this as an intelligent transportation system (ITS), which would consist of a system of sensors and communications devices along roads specifically designed to communicate with vehicles. The paper touts additional benefits from a wireless network such as communications between cars and traffic lights and smart parking systems in cities.

Much of this whitepaper could have been written over a decade ago and probably was. The benefits are the same ones that have been discussed for years, although there has been some progress in developing the chips and the technology that could enable smart vehicles.

But the one thing that is largely skipped over in the paper is who pays for the infrastructure to support this. The paper suggests a collaboration between roadbuilders (federal, state, and local governments) and the cellular carriers. There is also an allusion about offering such amazing new features that car owners will pony up for a subscription to use the technology. My guess is that the real purpose of this whitepaper is to lobby Congress for grant funding for roadside networks. The paper largely suggests that government should pay for the 5G infrastructure along roads while the cellular carriers collect any subscription revenues.

The benefits touted by the paper all sound worthwhile. It would be nice to feel safe when passing another vehicle. It would be nice if your car could automatically be directed to the nearest parking place to your planned destination. But it’s hard to think those benefits are enough to entice governments to pony up for the needed infrastructure. Most of the roads in America are funded by local and county governments, and most of the roads outside of major cities are lightly traveled. I imagine most counties would laugh at the idea of funding this when many of these same counties don’t yet have broadband to homes.

If enough cars are equipped with the chips to enable this technology, there might be a few major metropolitan areas that might consider the idea. But therein lies the chicken and the egg question – will a city consider an investment in the technology before most cars have the chips, and will carmakers spend the money to install the chips before there are real-world places where this will work?

I hope that the car industry is pursuing the car-to-car communications ideas. That technology could enable most of the safety aspects touted by this whitepaper without investing in the external cellular network. The chipmakers can still make a lot of money by improving car safety. But this idea of having a ubiquitous 5G network along roads is never going to be practical, but it’s an idea that will seemingly never go away.