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Senator Uses FCC Nomination Process To Question National Wireless Network
K7DAN contributes this excerpt from the intersection of politics, regulation, and high technology: "Sen. Charles Grassley is standing by his threat to place a hold on two nominees to the Federal Communications Commission over concerns about a controversial new wireless network the agency has allowed to move forward. The Iowa Republican this week accused the FCC of refusing to comply with his requests for information on its discussions with Virginia company LightSquared regarding its next-generation national wireless network. Some fear the network would hinder the effectiveness of high-precision GPS systems — used by the military, farmers and others. Grassley also raised questions about the involvement of Harbinger, the hedge fund behind the project and founded by Democratic donor Philip Falcone."
This seems like a reasonable inquiry. However, he's a replublican, and this is slashdot, so can someone enlighten me as to why it isn't? :)
Because it says right in the summary that this could mess with GPS, and Grassley wants to make sure it doesn't because GPS is an important piece of military technology?
Sounds like commie trickery to me too, senator.
One thing that so many don't realize about the U.S. Congress, and particularly the Senate, is that so much of the bullshit that goes on has nothing to do with their constitutional duties to craft, debate, and revise legislation, but rather to the skirting and enforcing of procedural rules. I'm not talking about overly-civilized stuff like Robert's Rules of Order that keep everyone from shouting at the same time. These are rules that, for instance, allow a single disgruntled Senator to completely uphold the nomination process - such as this case. Sometimes the Senator has demands for such and such information (which may be valid), but usually it is just a veil for quid pro quo. Most egregious of these procedures is the anonymous hold, which allows otherwise qualified candidates to have their nomination in limbo, indefinitely, at the whim of some Senator so craven they won't even dignify their objection in public. The Senate is authorized to advise and consent on executive nominations, not to hide in the corner and pout like children.
LighSquared technology IS IN VIOLATION OF CURRENT FCC RULES and requires an exemption.
LightSquared will mess with GPS for airplanes. (I'm a pilot).
LightSquared will mess with GPS for drivers. (I'm a driver)
LightSquared will remove GPS as being a useful technology in North America. (I'm in North America).
It will put North American users in the dark ages.
That alone is reason enough they should not be given said exemption.
It's only being debated because they have powerful backers.
Blow them all the hell up and improve our country.
E
You must not be very familiar with Senator Grassley, or you would not assume a motive unrelated to servicing his donors, specifically in this case big telecom.
Anyway, my understanding is this Lightsquared thing uses unused parts of the spectrum and won't bother GPS. And if it does, it couldn't possibly get FCC approval.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe if GPS manufacturers hadn't disregarded the DOD requirements on GPS, the technology wouldn't mess with your GPS http://m.lightsquared.com/press-room/press-releases/gps-industrys-failure-to-comply-with-department-of-defense/
Imagine I bought a timeshare for 2 weeks a year and noticed that nobody was using the week after mine and I started planning 3 weeks stays. A few years down the road, somebody else shows up and wants to stay during that third week. What right would I have to be pissed?
Personally, I'm more concerned to find out that it's apparently really easy to knock out military GPS.... It seems like somebody would want to fix that rather than complain about spectrum usage. Just my 2 cents.
I don't have time to make a sig
The issue at hand is that Lightsquared plans to place strong, satellite-based signals very close in frequency to that of the GPS system -- specifically, signals at 1526-1536 MHz (initially; although Lightsquared has rights to 1525-1559 MHz) that will be 60 dB stronger on the Earth's surface than the GPS L1 signals at 1575.42 MHz.
Since GPS signals are so weak (-130 to -150 dBm at the receive antenna terminals), most GPS receivers have minimal RF filtering, to avoid the insertion loss of the filters and thereby optimize GPS receiver sensitivity. Recognizing that GPS receivers do not have sharp selectivity, for decades it has been national policy (as well as good engineering practice) not to place strong signals near the GPS frequencies. This change in policy is the issue at hand.
Technically, the problem with the Lightsquared proposal is, even if the Lightsquared guys put lots of filtering on their transmitter, so that it is spectrally clean and has substantially no energy at the GPS frequency itself, the millions of existing GPS receivers already in the field will be unable to receive the desired L1 signal in the presence of the strong undesired Lightsquared signal, due to their limited filtering and dynamic range -- and, short of replacing every GPS receiver in the country, there's nothing Lightsquared can do about that.
Why Lightsquared thinks this scheme will work, and they won't be vilified in the press once GPS problems crop up, is something for the psychologists and sociologists to ponder.
Big Time Obama Donors are trying to get approval from the Obama FCC for something that might conflict with GPS. The Big Time Obama Donors are accused of exerting inappropriate political pressure on the FCC. The Republican in charge of FCC oversight wants to hold a hearing to check and make sure that the thing doesn't conflict with GPS (and that the FCC wasn't inappropriately pressured.)
Only a hack can read that and see "Republicans are evil." This is a pretty textbook example of the Legislative Branch acting as a check on the Executive Branch. This is EXACTLY how things are supposed to work.
It's not "lost" farming equipment. Farmers and industrial equipment use this tech to do things like level a field to within a 1/4" I watched a large D8 bulldozer that had a blade guided by one of these systems put a grade on a plot that was exactly 1" lower at one end than the other. This was important for the crop being planted there because they wanted very slow runoff without any pooling etc... It was amazing to watch really. If farmers lost systems like this it would have an impact, not only on their yields, but also on the amount of water, fertilizer, seed, even gasoline they'd use. It'd be bad for us all.
Then your understanding would be wrong. Lightsquared wants to set up an LTE network, with nationwide coverage. They would use terrestrial stations transmitting on frequencies immediately adjacent to GPS frequencies. The terrestrial stations would cover areas of dense population, and rural areas would be covered by satellite.
These frequencies were formerly allotted solely to satellite use. Lightsquared got someone at the FCC to do a fast track (public comment period of only 7 business days after announcement, and across Thanksgiving holiday 2010) approval for also using these frequencies terrestrially.
The problem is, terrestrial signals are MUCH closer/stronger than satellite ones, and many/most GPS receivers were designed based on adjacent signals having a satellite-level strength, and therefore are subject to interference from Lightsquared's terrestrial signals.
This isn't so much a political thing (except perhaps how Lightsquared's approval got fast tracked), but a technical one.
Here's something describing the situation as GPS users see it, and another, which describes the fast tracking which was done:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is stuff that you can do here but it would be expensive and possibly power hungry (some GPS receivers have to run off of batteries).
Normally this issue is resolved by placing guard bands around downlink bands where terrestrial transmitters are not allowed. By not doing this in a reasonable way, the FCC has simply messed up.
Wish I mod points. This is the crux of the entire problem. These satellite downlink frequencies were originally setup by the FCC for only that use. Now that the FCC messed up and allowed this to proceed we have a completely different ballgame - satellite downlink frequencies being transmitted at terrestrial locations and high power levels, but the existing receiving equipment (some 10-15 years old), is supposed to continue to work in an environment like this?
Existing receivers do not expect that kind of high power/close neighbor interfence because A> to have to filter it would reduce the received signal and sensitivity anyway (lower performance), B> any such filtering would be more expensive (power and cost), C> no filtering is required since the FCC already made sure no one would be swamping the signal by effectively keeping this area of spectrum "quiet" (or at least the received signals are all at similar power levels with sufficient guard bands).
There are other frequencies and better receivers, but these are not your cheapo handheld battery powered GPS receivers. So while technical solutions might be found going forward, the real problem is that most of the commercial GPS equipment will basically stop working - so who should pay to replace everyone's GPS (from handheld's, to in car units, iPhone's, etc)??
"Senator Grassley's problem with the nomination of the new FCC chairman has nothing to do with that."
Unless he's concerned that the FCC is making decisions based on political pressures, and not unbiased technical data and public input.
Many people aren't aware of the criticality of the GPS system. In addition to the well known consumer navigation products, GPS is a critical part of a lot of other businesses. It's used for syncronizing timing across cell phone towers (and lots of other timing uses), the FAA is working on making GPS a more useful/critical component of aviation, modern surveying depends on GPS accuracy, etc. Specific to a Senator from Iowa, farmers use GPS to auto-navigate their implements to plant and harvest crops. And, of course, there's the military use, which is why it was created in the first place.
Lightsquared got an allocation for satellite frequencies, then a fast track allowance for using them terrestrially, in essence getting very cheap spectrum compared to LTE competitors who paid for spectrum which was always intended for terrestrial use.
Now, they're disingenuously claiming that the fault is in the GPS receivers. Radio devices are designed with filters to block adjacent channel interference. But, there is no perfect filter, and costs increase exponentially as you try to get closer to a sharp "brick wall" cutoff. GPS devices were designed with the understanding that adjacent frequencies were for satellite use (which they were at the time), so they were designed with filters to deal with those signal levels. That's not unreasonable. Lightsquared's terrestrial signals can be expected to be +60 dbm stronger (1,000,000 times the power) than a satellite signal.
Note that complaints about this allowance for Lightsquared are widespread, and not limited to Republicans.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law