About OmniAir
The OmniAir Consortium was established in 2003 by DSRC industry advocates in order to help enable the national deployment of effective, interoperable 5.9GHz* DSRC systems. OmniAir formed not as an advocacy group, but as an organization that would create a valuable service to increase the likelihood that the community would adopt DSRC – the member-defined OmniAir Certification program. OmniAir is a non-profit association funded through membership dues and a partnership with the US Department of Transportation. The Consortium has also partnered with other organizations such as CVPC, CVTA, IEEE, and IBTTA to progress common goals.
OmniAir members share a unified objective: to improve mobility, efficiency, and safety for the traveling public and create cost savings and market opportunities for the operators and suppliers of current and next-generation DSRC systems. By testing for standard hardware and application protocols that together, permit ‘True Interoperability,’ the Consortium work to ensure that all members and users of DSRC – operators, application service providers, integrators, and the consumer – realize maximum benefit from their OmniAir-certified products in a safe, reliable, innovative, cost-competitive and dynamic environment.
The OmniAir Consortium is located in Falls Church, Virginia, 9 miles from Washington, DC. Members, however, are located from New York to California, Canada to Texas and points between as well as Europe and Australia. Meetings for the entire membership are held twice a year in various locations, but regular business is conducted via teleconference or webex.
* The Federal Communication Commission allocated the 5.9GHz spectrum band (5.950-5.925GHz) in 1999 to enable a national, interoperable communications network to provide safety, mobility and commercial applications to the driving public. In a 2003 decision, after a technology ‘down-select’ process, the FCC chose a specific technology based on open IEEE standards. The reason the FCC broke with tradition and selected a winning protocol was the mandate of safety – it required a common protocol, one compliant to a set of standards and allowing systems that could be interoperable across regions and vehicles. The FCC rules for 5.9GHz DSRC said that industry shall decide the means to certify compliance to standards. The OmniAir Consortium was the response.
