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FCC Bars Lightsquared From Using Airwaves
New submitter mc6809e writes with news that Lightsquared might have just been killed. From the article: "A proposed wireless broadband network that would provide voice and Internet service using airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions should be shelved because it interferes with GPS technology, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday. The news appears to squash the near-term hopes for the network pushed by LightSquared, a Virginia company that is majority-owned by Philip Falcone, a New York hedge fund manager."
LightSquared, naturally, continues to deny that the interference is real.
It's my understanding* that Lightsquared's equipment was never the issue, but rather the GPS equipment that got interference were just poorly designed. If the GPS equipment was held to the standards it should have been, Lightsquared's equipment wouldn't have interfered. Yet Lightsquared are the ones being shafted, simply because GPS is "too important". Really, the FCC and/or the GPS equipment manufacturer should be the ones being penalised. FCC beucase it's their job to look after this sort of thing and the manufacturers for producing shoddy equipment.
*However note that I may be wrong, being an imperfect being and all that.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The FCC made a good and wise decision in this situation.
It is unrealistic to expect the desires of a company which wants
only to make money should override the safety of a public
which depends increasingly on GPS.
I mean if it gives you broadband, voice and blocks GPS guided missiles, what more could you want?
"A proposed wireless broadband network that would provide voice and Internet service using airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions should be shelved because it interferes with GPS technology, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday
That's a massive simplification. They sell mobile satellite internet, and have done so for a long time, and will do so into the indeterminate future, this has nothing to do with that.
The LS idea was to provide a backend carrier to local on ground cellular providers for internet traffic. Same as your off the shelf 3G service you now "enjoy" but instead of your greedy provider paying AT&T (or whoever) for fiber to the cell phone tower, they'd use the satellite service.
Except... they didn't have an allocation for their ground network. Hmm. What if we reuse the satellite freqs, yeah that'll work. Well, except that the would ruin/destroy/eliminate the possibility of anyone on the ground hearing the satellites without a huge dish or technically impossible filtering. OK no problemo we'll dump all our satellite customers and focus on the ground guys, and use the marketing for satellite "as if" we're not a ground 3G provider. Whoops that'll kill all the adjacent satellite services too. Oh Oh, GPS is adjacent.
Well, so much for that bad idea.
Note there is no reason that instead of paying AT&T for fiber to a cell tower in the middle of nowhere, LS can't provide slow and high latency service RIGHT NOW to that cell tower... this FCC bar only stops them from setting up their own tower and using the satellite freqs to set up something like a 3G service.
The standard /. car analogy is this is kind of like getting rid of the SUV exception where hyper obese ultra low MPG passenger cars are permitted under the legal fiction they are classified as trucks not cars. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters on an allocation for satellite transmitters only?". Or maybe a better analogy is LS thought it would be fun to build a network of hydrogen fueling stations, and figured no one would have any problem if they used an off the shelf gasoline filling nozzle instead of a technically correct solution that would not result in an infinite number of burnout fires. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters right next to satellite receivers and even daydreaming that won't knock out the receivers".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wasn't one of the stated goals of Lightsquared to help little companies compete with the big telcoms on the wireless broadband and mobile phone service fronts? If that's the case, I suspect way more was involved here than just GPS interference.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why am I surprised that some rich Wall St prick thinks like all other spoilt Wall St pricks, and thinks that they are exempt from the rules that everyone else is subjected to, and try and get one over everyone else so he can get even more obscenely rich than he is.
I hope that prick Philip Falcone gets bankrupted for his hubris, and learns some morals and a little humility.
This ruling basically renders Lightsquared dead in the water - they will no doubt continue to challenge the FCC but it's extremely unlikely that it will be overturned. There's $14 billion invested from Harbinger Capital at stake, which I can imagine is a large chunk of funds and could also bring them down in the fallout.
Whats interesting here is that this part of the spectrum has been licensed to them (and presumably paid for), yet is unusable because up to 75% of GPS receivers, that use frequencies just up the range, next door to Lightsquared's spectrum, have insufficient adjacent channel rejection and will be jammed. This is not a problem of Lightsquared's making, it's because the GPS's have been built to poor design standards and allowed onto the market and into circulation.
Presumably there is therefore an agency that can be sued for allowing the spectrum to be compromised in this way? $14B is a lot of money...
We do need to utilize these spectrums.
I think what we have here is another example of why business and politics don't mix. Falcone tried to shmooze his way through the system by budding up to the administration and it backfired by creating enemies.
I don't know if his tech is causing a problem or if it's all a big conspiracy to shut him down. It doesn't matter. He assumed he would pass inspection before the fact because he knew all the right people. He had made no preparation for rejection and that was stupid. Had he done what everyone else does... he would have waited until he tech was approved before making any big expenses.
Smart businesses make donations to both parties and focuses on avoiding conflict rather then making special friends. Friends come with their enemies and Obama has lots.
The only thing he can do is try again either with modified technology so he can pass inspection or try a different spectrum. Sucks... but it's that or give up.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's @641 beats mother fuckers.
The article seems to gloss over the most critical point that breaks this deal, painting LightSquared as a victim in the process:
LightSquared's spectrum (which was bought from another company) was for SATELLITE transmissions, not TERRESTRIAL.
Satellite spectrums are much cheaper, but can't be used for terrestrial transmissions.
LightSquared is in fact trying to cheap out by using a cheaper spectrum.
Analogy:
LightSquared tried to buy a plot of cheap residential land to start a chemical/manufacturing plant, which affects nearby residents.
They should have bought a piece of commercial land that supports their requirements.
More technically:
Satellite signals are weak as they are sent from huge distances from satellites with limited power. To receive these signals, the receivers must be tuned to be sensitive to these signals. If LightSquare were to transmit terrestrially from the bordering spectrum (to pass through walls and what-have-you), the transmitted strength will be thousands of times stronger than the GPS signals, invariably causing interference with GPS signals. Even if GPSes are built with a filter (which they shouldn't need to, the nearby spectrums should also be weak signals!), it would be prohibitively expensive/unfeasible to filter the strong terrestrial signals.
when space gets populated
LightSquared would NOT get approvals to operate because they tried to surreptitiously repurpose satellite spectrum for much, much higher powered ground-based systems, thus causing interference all over adjacent low-powered satellite bands.
Yet another case of too politically-connected to fail without a crapload of useless noise.
-ted
FTFY.
The thing is GPS technology is in tons of random electronics. Since GPS satellites are essentially transmit their identification and an accurate time, GPS is used to keep time in everything from ATMs to our power grid to consumer "atomic" clocks.
Cellphones also use GPS signals to triangulate their position on earth, so that they can connect to the nearest tower with minimal power. This is more FCC doing its real job, protecting everyone from this interference shit.
Not satphone, terrestrial communications. To sum it up, they wanted to transmit from towers and not surprisingly it overpowered the communications coming from the satellites.
Amen to that.
For national security reasons though, LS must fail.
At least in its bid to use the spectrum. National security trumps everything else. The question is whether LS should be the one to pay for it.
If the currently allocated bandwidth has proven to cause interference to other services, pick a different band of frequencies to use. They'll have to modify their equipment and I'm sure that will be expensive but if they have the capital to do it, I wouldn't rule them dead just yet.
Let's rewind back to the year 2000.
You're a hardware engineer. You've been tasked with building a GPS front end in a cost-effective manner.
You decide to do your homework. You look up the FCC regulations for adjacent frequency bands. Since very high power terrestrial transmissions were prohibited by federal law (i.e. punishable by pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison time for violations), you run the calculations and decide how many -dB/octave your front-end filter needs to exclude signals that you could expect in real world applications.
Sure, you could have gone with a filter that had 2x or 3x steeper roll-off. But why? Your manager asked you to do this in a cost-effective manner, and it's patently illegal for such strong signals to exist.
So you're telling me that a hardware engineer who does his homework and designs a filter that can remove signals which are the maximum legal power is "shoddy"?
:(){
Ah, you're assuming that GPS and the radio technologies with which you're familiar use the same transmission concepts. They most certainly do not. GPS signals are actually *below* the noise floor, for example, so squelch is utterly irrelevant.
You seem decently versed in communications, so I invite you to read up on how GPS signals actually work. It's fascinating stuff, and you'll have a much better understanding of why LightSquared's proposed system is utterly unworkable.
I'll have a look... though I'm not sure how a system that operates below the noise floor is expected to work (am I being dim again?).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Does it appear to anyone else that at least half the Lightspeed defenders must be paid shills for the company? Think about it -- GPS has been around for 20+ years and is considered a utility now, the facts of Lightspeed's purchase of the spectrum (only intended for satellite use) are not in question, and neither is the physics of humongously strong signals next to a band where the signals are below the noise floor. And, who gets all excited about some company's spectrum license unless have a vested interest -- it's not usually of much general interest. I'd like to be proved wrong so I can continue to trust he integrity of sites like /. but I'd say , "Reader beware".
... could cause interference with the market dominance of At+t and Verizon.
What does this have to do with politics? GPS operates in a satellite band, and the surrounding traffic is also supposed to be satellite. It is perfectly proper for GPS makers to design their filters around their expectations for surrounding traffic. It would have just been needless complexity and expense for zero end-user benefit to design them tighter.
If I build my house in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmland, peace, and quiet, you can damn sure I'm going to protest when somebody tries to re-zone the land next door to be a shotgun range. I'm not going to be too impressed when the shotgun club guys tell me to just add more insulation to my house.
GPS signal are so weak they are below the noise floor. I dont know about you, but that just boggles my mind.
Even with quiet adjacent bands - within the origonal intension of the satellite spectrum allocation - the electronics engineers have a difficult job designing a circuit to process these signals. To then add nearby terrestrial interference that is thousands of times larger is just absurd, the size and expense of the filter required to handle this is impractical to build into most devices.
GPS was around way before LightSquared's current plan.
Lightsquared doesn't want to set up a new SatPhone service. They want to use their satellite spectrum for ground-to-ground stations instead. GPS was using their own satellite spectrum LONG before LS decided they wanted to use adjacent spectrum for vastly more powerful (read: interfering) ground service. If all LightSquared wanted to do was set up a SatPhone service, then we would quite correctly be heaping scorn on cheap GPS makers...
It's not "shitty design" when a GPS cannot block out a tidal wave of signal from an adjacent band, when that band was only supposed to contain a garden-hose sized signal. Yes, equipment must "accept any interference", but not if that interference vastly more powerful than the spectrum was originally supposed to deal with.
The equipment design is the easy part; the problem is spectrum scarcity. LightSquared bought up a bunch of cheap satellite spectrum with the idea of using it for a vastly more valuable terrestrial network. While they DO have the capital to change their equipment to use a different band, they DON'T have the capital to actually purchase that band.
This bar/"telescope sucks" analogy is perhaps one of the best ones I've heard yet. Too bad I already made replies and I can't mod you up myself.
:(){
Let's be a little more careful in the terms we're using here. The GPS equipment under consideration includes precision units used by private and government surveyors, some individual units persisting in great condition for twenty or more years with proper maintenance. They cost from about $30,000 to around $50,000 each, and for a private surveyor especially, that's a huge outlay on equipment. Now LS comes along and wants to overrun frequencies next to that of such precision units, which were designed before some of the LS staff were out of diapers, for a band use that was hardly envisioned by anyone when the units came out. This type of GPS unit is used for constructing bridges, high-rise buildings, freeway flyovers, and many other applications that call for high precision. So we are NOT just talking about dashboard nav units, but also aircraft, survey, military, and other uses that involve the safety of thousands of lives; although getting lost with a car GPS or a GPS phone and coming to grief is also a bad thing.
This is a case where time and technology have caught up with the legislation that governs the bandwidth spectrum, not a case of shoddy industry practice.
Doh, where is the /. edit or delete function? Anyway, yes I meant, "Lightsquared". And I realize that this is sort of an ad hominem attack which is not what I really meant either, but my basic question remains.
More like LightSquashed BADDA BING!!!
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That's great news - it made my investment in competitor Clearwire (CLWR) jump over 5%.
Not that they don't have their own problems, but at 1.70 at the time, with all the spectrum they own, I could not resist.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Maybe, but I suspect it's more likely that Slashdot has a number of armchair EE/RF engineer "wannabes" that have nothing better to do than to spew uninformed bullshit.
OH WAIT THAT'S 95% OF SLASHDOT POSTS
In a just world, LightSquared would be refused the use of this spectrum for terrestrial communications, as it has always been regulated.
LightSquared wants to change the regulations? Great, let them pay for ameliorating the IMPACT of those changes. Namely, let them design a GPS receiver that operates properly with a high-power terrestrial signal interfering with the GPS spectrum, and manufacture & distribute - free of charge to everybody who has a GPS receiver that is "shoddily" designed. And by "shoddy," I assume you mean "built to work properly in the conditions created by regulation guaranteeing them the certainty of no high-powered transmissions on neighboring frequencies."
This is actually one case where it appears that money has NOT bought political sway at the expense of ordinary consumers. I'm pleased to see that result.
"GPS signal are so weak they are below the noise floor. I dont know about you, but that just boggles my mind."
Hooray! Someone who gets it!
The FCC rules you refer to do not mean what you think they do. First and foremost, they only apply to TRANSMITTERS operating in UNLICENSED bands. 'Must accept any interference' means that you have no REGULATORY protection if your unlicensed transmissions are interfered with. Even the 'must not cause interference' is not a technical requirement (the technical considerations are handled elsewhere), but rather means that if you are interfering with LICENSED transmissions you must stop using the device, even if the device itself is working correctly and is within the parameters of the unlicensed band.
GPS receivers are not transmitters. The GPS band is not unlicensed. Your argument is completely wrong.
Well, they probably bought _a bit_ of political sway to make it to the tests at least instead of getting thrown out immediately.
What did they hope to achieve is unclear, unless their business plan was "spend generously on building prototypes and testing (delegated to our relatives' firms), when investors come asking questions, point at all those evil bureaucrats in FCC"
LightSquared's FCC license requires that they not interfere with the incumbent base of commercial GPS receivers.
Independent testing has shown that LightSquared's terrestrial transmitters do, in fact, interfere.
Oh well.
DSSS/processing gain.
"Lazy/Cheap GPS manufacturers, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH..."
Consider this:
1. Engineering in the business world is about getting the best bang for your buck. After a certain performance level, it becomes exponentially more costly to implement filters with high roll offs.
2. RF is a incredibly complex magic and filter design isn't magic. Filtering can distort your incoming signal. This is EXTREMELY bad for HIGH PRECISION GPS devices as they use the edges of the incoming signal to measure certain characteristics to determine position and GPS time. Aircrafts, military, surveying, farming all use high precision devices.
3. The band that LS wants to use was originally liscensed for non-terrestial use. The "cheap" filters used by GPS manufacturers work well enough to maintain accuracy with signals in adjacent bands of relative equal power. This is not defective design, defective electronics, defective filters, or being cheap. This is efficient engineering going by guidlines. The same sort of efficiency that allows you to have a $100 portable handheld GPS. More filtering means bigger size, heavier weight, and higher power consumption.
4. Why are the GPS manufacturers the lazy/cheap ones when they designed devices according to FCC regulations and a new company comes in and wants to essentially turn those regulations upside down?
5. Who is going to shell out the billions that is going to be required to replace all legacy devices currently in use? Your average consumers could get by with a couple meters of degredation, but who's fiscally responsible for replacing the high precesion devices?
6. Having a relatively large signal relatively close to a relatively small signal can have other consequences. Even with the best filter solution, leakage from the large signal can have a adverse affect on the SNR of the smaller signal. Before you even argue this point, google bandlimiting.
Hi, I'm one of the people who was involved in the testing of GPS equipment for PNT EXCOM. GPS is a unique form of radio communication, and you cannot apply the same principles you would for a conventional radio to GPS. I highly suggest reading up on how GPS actually works (its pretty darn impressive) because I think with your background, fully informed, you'll understand the problem.
,quote>LightSquared, naturally, continues to deny that the interference is real.
Cue the Interference Deniers in 3...2...1...
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
It's one of the qualities of spread-spectrum CDMA. GPS signals can work with relatively good precision around the level of the noise floor (I'm not sure about below though).
Huh... L^2 wins the spectrum fair and square... then the GPS lobbyists get the FCC to carve out a chunk of spectrum... I hope they get a refund or better yet, win a suite.
http://www.archive.org/details/XMinus1_A
It was done in 1950's pulp sci-fi. Casinos operated near observatory and the casino firework shows prevented observatory from taking good pictures. Casinos paid politicians, so the observatory was left in the cold. The observatory then started offering "readings based on the stars" for free to tourists, and started singling out a casino a week as "bad luck" for the tourist until that casino stopped the fireworks. It was a pretty good story 60 years ago and stands the test of time.
A Thousand Dollars a Plate
http://www.archive.org/details/XMinus1_A
MP3 version of X Minus One radio drama of the short story.
...it would be, well, anywhere that somebody tries to support a point by saying "there have been several stories floating around".
Look up correlation. You're not being dim, but you do have some (extremely interesting) things to learn about.
The FCC loves bribes. Of course Lightsquared's threat to the telecoms was going to fail. Any idiot could see that from the start.
Anyone who threatens incumbent telecoms will be demonized as puppy kickers and grandmother harassers, guaranteed.
"Doh, where is the /. edit or delete function? Anyway, yes I meant, "Lightsquared"."
Oh, *that* bothers you. But "Queue" the defenders is ok?
There's GPS and then there's GPS. First, stat phones are also low power. Then there's a huge difference between the little unit on or in the dash of a car compared to the one that is part of a flight management system in an aircraft instrument panel. Difference in quality and a huge difference in price and an even greater difference in safety. The FCC is not concerned about the ones in cars and trucks, or the one you carry in a back pack when hiking, or the one built in your cell phone. A few of the ones they are concerned about are the ones used to position aircraft for reduced separation (vertically and horizontally) or taking the place of an ILS, or part of an "auto land" system. They are also concerned about survey equipment. These are the pieces of equipment that do not have a part 15 warning about having to accept any interference. It's illegal to interfere with any of these precision devices. These receivers cost thousands of dollars and they are the ones used in tests to prove whether LightSquared's signals caused interference to GPS. BTW even the portable units can run $3,000 or more. The panel mounted ones get expensive. Ground based augmentation is permitted in this spectrum, but they are low powered stations. LightSquared had announced they would be running many thousands of stations running on the order of 40 to 45KW which is a long way from low power. IIRC Typical cell phone towers run about 10 watts per transmitter, but that transmitter has many channels so the power per channel is well less than a watt compared to LightSquared's 45,000 watts. Basically, LightSquared tried to bend the regulations and use the "ground augmentation stations" at far higher power than normal and they would be their primary stations. IOW they tried to compete with the big boys on the cheap, by cheating the system.
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