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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.
Really, the FCC and/or the GPS equipment manufacturer should be the ones being penalised.
As a practical matter, there's no way to do that. If you allow Lightspeed to operate, you penalize the USERS of the (allegedly) badly designed GPS devices. It does suck to be Lightspeed, because GPS really is much more important than them.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
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.
it's more like getting a permit to open a bar next door to an observatory but the city strictly requires you to keep your outdoor lighting to a minimum so as not to disturb the telescope next door. yet you still put up a huge neon sign and searchlight and when the observatory complains that your light pollution has ruined its ability to gather data, you say 'it's not my fault your telescope sucks'.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
And what if someone decided to operate a station on an adjacent frequency channel, with 10 megawatts of power? Or even half a channel over? (Rules? What rules? We just want a little variance in the rules!) Then suddenly people trying to receive your station get interference because the channel separation rules weren't designed for that kind of power on adjacent channels? The problem isn't "badly designed GPS devices", it's that this is a band which was allocated specifically for the purpose of satellite communication, which is by its very nature rather low-powered to begin with.
I'm almost surprised it took this long, except I'm sure there has been some ohbummer-related political interference going on behind the scenes. And it's probably still going on even now.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
What's the sense in building a receiver to reject adjacent channel interference that, via an FCC band plan, was never meant to exist? Managing the spectrum so that large amplitude signals are not present is a whale of a lot cheaper than turning a $100 GPS receiver into a $200 GPS receiver when the design and construction of the filtering necessary to reject the supposedly non-existent adjacent channel high power signal causes the doubling of the price.
If everyone just goes by the band plan, and doesn't try to do some end-run around the intent of the rules, then we can have $100 GPS receivers instead of $200 GPS receivers. I think building them cheaper is the better idea.