Slashdot Mirror
LightSquared Hires Lawyers To Prep For GPS Battle
itwbennett writes "Following Tuesday's FCC ruling saying that the company's LTE network interferes with GPS, LightSquared's primary investor Philip Falcone is looking to sue the FCC and the GPS industry. Alternately, Falcone is considering ways to appeal the FCC's decision or even swap spectrum with the Department of Defense."
This is the 4th or 5th story I have read about LightSquared and so far the only thing I know about them is that their shit messes up GPS.
Their for-profit system screws up GPS which has been around a LOT longer than they have , the FCC finds this and blocks their system and THEY want to sue the FCC and GPS makers???
I'm sorry, is this Falcone guy just gold plated arrogant ass who thinks the world should revolve around him, or is he just a plain, good old grade A fsckwit?
Alternately, Falcone is considering ways to appeal the FCC's decision or even swap spectrum with the Department of Defense.
Seriously? I know they're understandably upset that the satellite bands they purchased can't be used for terrestrial, but come on guys, this is just a waste of time.
You know what wouldn't be a waste of time? Creating the satellite based network their original proposal had.
It's a bit sad consumer level GPS receivers are quite narrowband and not easily (at least unintentionally) jammed by a signal outside (but near) the GPS band. Most GPS equiptment on boats and airplanes are a lot older and less resistant. The GPS in your phone is better than the GPS on an (older) aircraft.
FTA: "...Through a lawsuit, the company might seek to force GPS vendors to make their receivers filter out LightSquared's frequencies, the Journal said..."
Seriously? I would love to hear from this idiot how he proposes to do this for existing units. Horses, barn doors, yadda yadda... I'm no EE/RF guy, but I'm sure its a bit more than simple software patches to the units. And I'll be DAMNED if I have to go buy another unit just because "his" part of the spectrum isnt quite up to par with what he wants to do with it.
Somebody needs a good cockpunch to remind him that while its often disappointing that you cant achieve your goal due to outside forces, sometimes those forces are just plain beyond your control and you need to move on instead of lawyering up and being a dickhead about it.
/ Grabs popcorn before the show starts.
// Hopes Darl makes a cameo in this one
It's also laughable how they believe there's even a remote possibility that they could swap spectrum with the DoD.
Same as used in the rest of the world? Europe has no problems with GPS and 4G.
My idea proved to be technically infeasible, so I'm going to sue the FCC for calling a spade a spade, and rest of the world for not getting out of my way.
And maybe God while I'm at it, for creating a reality that won't bend to my will. (Although it sort-of does, in my head.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The FCC has made many flawed decisions in the past. Their approval of Broadband over Power lines is a classic example. All the testing showed that the system would interfere with EVERY radio service in the HF spectrum, yet they allowed the service to be rolled out. The backlash from this has hopefully killed off any attempt to actually deploy such systems, but the FCC is still insisting that it's technically a good idea.
So in this case they have done the same thing, given approval to a system that would cause interference with another radio service, already in use. Only now, they've done the right thing by pulling the rug out before the damage could be done. However, by not making the right decision before letting investment proceed they probably DO owe the investors a good chunk of damages, as they should also owe those in the BPL business.
also because GPS was in place far before LTE was even thought of.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The GPS on a phone has to operate a few centimeters from a transmitter, and on top of this there is likely all sorts of digital hashing it has to deal with as well, which tends to have wide frequency content (over a short distance). The interior of a smartphone is a relatively harsh RF environment and the GPS needs stronger filtering to operate. This additional filtering (and space constraints that limit component selection) result in more attenuation of the GPS signal, and thus worse fixes. But it doesn't matter because it is just a cellphone, and the GPS is a nice-to-have which can be augmented with other coarse positioning systems when needed.
Navigation systems need to have a stronger GPS signal, so they have more reliable and precise solutions. The designed their filters to adequately attenuate adjacent frequencies, for what they were licensed for, while minimizing attenuation of the GPS band. Furthermore, given the larger size, they can use RF shielding on the cabin as a way to block the closest sources of interference, and only need to design the filters to block signals from the ground. These are higher quality filters (since they can afford the money/space for better components), they are just engineered with different goals. They could have filtered more, but it would have been counter-productive.
LightSquared is proposing to transmit with over 10,000 times the power that they are currently licensed for, which is more than 1 million times the power of GPS signals here on the ground. Even if you were to upgrade every GPS system out there with the best filters we can make today, you would still have either increased interference from the proposed LightSquared system, or attenuation of the GPS signals. And LightSquared has yet to offer to upgrade every GPS system out there.
The fact is that LightSquared picked the worst possible piece of spectrum to convert to terrestrial broadband. They acquired the company who owned it for cheap because everyone else (all the incumbent wireless operators) realized this, and spend their money licensing other (more expensive) spectrum instead. LightSquared has no one to blame here but themselves.
Sue the magnetic field!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The GPS is owned and operated by the United States Government and the Department of Defense. Good luck with that.
Their intended product interferes with GPS, and they intend to sue the victim and the government. I hope these SOBs get crushed in court. GPS is critical these days for so many things in the infrastructure, as well as being needed by the military. Lightspeed's network would interfere with GPS used by commercial and military aerial navigation. If these clowns think they have priority over that, they deserve to lose all their investment.
There's a reason why this spectrum is much cheaper than others, in that it's assigned to satellite communication.
The assumption being made is that if you license this spectrum, you need to make significant costs to actually put satellites into space, so the licensing is cheaper.
So they want both now (cake meme), cheap spectrum, but not put satellites into orbit (which their original proposal by the way *did* have), but instead use it as ground based spectrum (which is much more expensive to license)
Car analogy: I buy a classic old timer, so I don't have to pay road taxes (or much less anyway) and much less insurance. Now I put those license plates on a Hummer and still expect to not pay the road taxes and much less insurance...
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You don't get what a provisional approval means. The FCC said, we don't know if what you want to do is possible but we are not going to say no right away, if you want, you can proof your claim.
Had the FCC not done this, they would have been a dinosaur, an unmovable object on the road to progress. Instead they allowed a test, a test to prove that what the FCC believed (that the proposal would not work) was wrong.
It is like a provisional driving license or are you going to claim that if you get a provisional driving license, the state is obliged to give you a full license regardless of whether you pass the test?
Provisional licenses are pretty common, often you need a license to do something for real but you first need to do it in a test to do but to test it you need a license. To get around this, you issue a provisional license. It allows test and allows people to challenge assumptions but if you fail the test, so be it. Unless you want to sue your examiner for failing you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Can't Lightsquared just be assigned some other available parts of the spectrum that don't interfere with GPS in exchange for giving back the problematic assignation?
Or is there none available?
think about it- if the DOD agrees, they get to buy all new toys...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Seems like a good way for LS to burn more money.
It almost seems like that's their purpose.
Another way to explain spending $1B+ before verifying that the technology was possible is a shortage of due diligence.
Hopefully a law suite will clearly determine if this was the case.
It is unfortunate that we don't get another competitive broad band wireless carrier though.
If politics in spite of engineering doesn't work,
the hopefully the next guy with $1B will try politics supported by engineering.
I'm going to answer your entire point just by answering your provisional driving license analogy.
If I was to apply for a provisional driving license, while stating my intention was to use it to gain a pilots license rather than a drivers license, would the DMV not be remiss to issue me one under the basis that it might happen?
No, this is not something automatically prevented by rules. A better analogy would be if you applied for a provisional license and said that you intended to study for the driving test solely by playing video games and learning the rules of the road subliminally. The DMV might have advised against it, but ultimately if you pass the test they have to issue you with a license.
The GPS makers took advantage of the lack of adjacent channels to cheap out on the filters. The GPS industry has no license relating to the spectrum in question, they are listening on it by virtue of having poor filters. If the spectrum involved was adjacent to something less important like ISM band (wifi routers etc.) or ham radio, the FCC would probably have said "by better filters you idiots, you only bought the bit you are sitting on ". But this is a case where if you screw up big enough not only to affect yourself, but everyone else, everyone else has your back. To be completely fair though, enough power would overload any filter and designing for the environment is part of it, so the FCC puts quiet things next to sensitive things, and groups loud things together to give similar dynamic range. In short, the FCC is doing their job, the GPS folks kind of didn't but not in any criminal fashion.
So if I propose a communication system that involves shouting loudly through a megaphone across the street and the environment agency shuts it down, not only could I sue them but all the house-builders who did not provide adequate sound insulation?
This idea that the GPS industry "cheaped out on the filters" just won't die, apparently. The fact is, every engineering project is an exercise in trade-offs. Designs must balance the requirements with the budget and laws of physics. When you know the environment, you design towards it. In other words, the GPS makers designed their equipment based on the fact that the nearby spectrum would be low-powered satellite communications. Thus the filters on the front ends of the GPS receivers were built to reject that type of sideband interference. To do otherwise would not not be the correct design decision.
If everyone had to design their RF sections as you imply, every radio receiver in the world would need a 500 dB/decade "brick wall" filter to reject possibly ANY signal not included in its passband. These filters would be so large and complex as to render mobile devices impractical. The costs involved would make such devices too expensive to sell.
Please do not continue to drink the Lightsquared kool-aid. It is toxic.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Lightsquared is foolish if they think they are going to get any further. In reality the feds could just say "national security issue" and their case would end.
The root problem here is the idea of auctioning off the radio spectrum. It is essentially a TAX on innovation and the eventual users, which is then used as an excuse to give large monopoly profits on those who are willing to bid up the tax, knowing that WE will pay it in the end. The bigger the tax, the more profit they make.
We should instead manage it as a public commons, having bands set up for experimentation, and then wider spaces for more established modes as they become popular, and have more users. Somewhere in there should be a set of spaces for mesh network backbone.
Is it worth paying twice as much for all of your GPS devices to be able to get Lightsquared?
Definitely.
But I may be biased, I don't use GPS, and am frustrated with my lack of ISP options.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Basically what happened here was that GPS manufacturers don't want to produce decent circuits to drive the GPS units. Unless both of these signal operate in the same frequency and use the same access technology ( OFDM, FDM, QPSK etc... ) then they wont entirely block each other out. What the GPS guys are complaining about is that they will have to produce GPS systems capable on have highly focused signal reception systems that can separate out interference. It's a classic example of lazy design = cry baby's.
Before someone flys off the handle and acts likes I have no idea what I'm talking about, I've designed highly focused radio systems using very similar technology. The difficultly in design goes WAY up but on the other hand when you trying only focus in on a small band you should ONLY be looking that band and nothing else, if you throw together crappy antenna's ( Apple ) then your going to have crappy reception and every other wireless / radio technology will block you. It's not there fault, it's yours, if you do the design and do the design to an exceptional level you will be able to find the needle in the haystack.
Maybe it's time for the GPS guys to start designed better GPS units which solve this issue instead of complaining about it. If the spectrum doesn't get used now it will in the future and we'll come to the same issues then. The only true solution is going back to the lab and over designing the devices now and we will never have this issue. If you do have half assed work you'll always be redoing it later.
https://secure.dslreports.com/shownews/LightSquared-Lawyers-Up-For-FCC-Assault-118429
"LightSquared is apparently trying to convince the Defense Department to swap spectrum they're unlikely to give up for LightSquared spectrum nobody wants. Again, LightSquared lacks the cash to wage any sustained battle on this front, and Falcone faces two pending inquiries by the SEC for unrelated financial infractions. He's also now being sued by a group of investors in Harbinger Capital Partners who claim the effort "squandered billions of dollars."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/corbin-hiar/fcc-lightsquared-_b_1280076.html
"The company has vowed to challenge the suspension, but how long it can stay financially solvent is in question. For example, one of its biggest contracts -- a $13 billion, 15-year deal with Sprint, the third largest U.S. wireless carrier -- required that LightSquared resolve the FCC concerns about GPS before March. The value of Harbinger, which is heavily invested in LightSquared, fell by half last year."
After Obama gets elected it could be a different story, and Soros is involved as well (whatever that means) but I think he's cooked as people are backing out of the deal and Harbinger is going to sue his arse.
I've watched people like Falcone and groups like Harbinger work before, I found the process disturbing to say the least as it is all about money with no real thought or regard to what they are actually doing--other than the money.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
But you do use GPS in everything that you do unless you live in a cave with no power or internet access.
Mine is still 240p... and I like him that way.
But this is only an issue with consumer GPS receivers, not with the satellites or anything else that is involved in the things I do.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
At some point, doesn't it become unethical for a lawyer to hire on with a company to pursue a lawsuit that they have absolutely no chance in hell of winning?
Any half-competent lawyer is going to tell LightSquared to cut its losses and go begging on bended knee to the FCC and ask them to please allow them to license some other spectrum instead.
And if they persist in their stupidity, I'd think any ethical lawyer would quit. But maybe I have an overly-optimistic view of the state of corporate legal ethics.
It's telling that the company keeps on hiring lawyers when a single educated engineer would be able to tell them that their case is impossible, because it is fighting against laws of physics.
Lightsquared bought a disused satellite spectrum that was used to having weak satellite signals on it. That same spectrum sits next to the GPS spectrum. Because of this, the GPS system never had to deal with a strong signal sitting right next to their spectrum. Should they have done that? Yes. But they didn't because it was never an issue. Now lightsquared is trying to build a system that will create a LOT of noise just outside of their spectrum and many GPS systems will simply stop working.
Lightsquared should have seen this coming when they bought that spectrum. Is it their fault the GPS people are having a hard time? Not really. But they were aware of the issue from the start and they went ahead with their program anyway knowing it would be an issue. So even though the GPS people are being somewhat irresponsible with their GPS designs they're a totally vital system and we can't compromise them for any reason.
A compromise we could make is tell the GPS people their new system need to deal with noise outside their spectrum henceforth. Then wait ten years for the new systems to penetrate the market. Then let lightsquared or whomever blast away on that spectrum. Short of that, lightsquared is going to pound sand... right or wrong. They knew this was an issue.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We should repeal those outdated laws, we can't be moving in new, digital millenium with all that nonsense pushed by Nyquist and other guys hindering start-ups that could bring cheap broadband to all the America and create thousands of new jobs.
It's like complaining that the searchlight you installed near a traffic light shouldn't be causing accidents because drivers shouldn't be looking at it. They aren't trying to, but there's a limit!
There is no such thing as a complete brick wall filter. The entire field of electronic warfare is based on this. You have several stages of filtering and amplification in any front end. If you saturate the first-stage amplifier, the desired signal can't be picked out in the second stage.
This is a problem for GPS receivers, and especially precision GPS receivers, because steep filters tend to have very wiggly phase responses, and that means that the time the signal takes to get through the filter becomes uncertain. So the more accurate the GPS receiver, the wider the first stages of filtering have to be.
If the out of band signal was also a satellite signal as was promised by the FCC and international spectrum treaties when the receviers were designed, it would be tolerable, but terrestrial transmitters are both higher powered, and much closer, so the received power Lightsquared proposed to use was almost a billion times higher.
It's not surprising that there were problems.
Lightquared bought some property zoned residential, and proposed to build a skyscraper on it. (Which would make them a lot of money, because commercial zoned would have cost a lot more.) The neighbours complained that it would cause problems for them. The FCC let Lightsquared try to prove there wouldn't be a problem but, as everyone with a brain expected, there were. p> All their whining is trying to confuse the issue for people who don't understand radio technology.
Falcone thinks he can sue TWO government entities at the same time? File this under the heading of "more money than brains". Especially since one of his targets is the DoD, which has the first, last and only word on GPS operation.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
From last summer. He's worried about the long-term implications of spectrum not being shared.
http://tales-of-the-sausage-factory.wetmachine.com/my-insanely-long-field-guide-to-lightsquared-v-the-gps-guys/
No, the GPS makers didn't take advantage. Satellite transmitters are fairly low power, and it takes a high-gain receiver to pick up the signal. Especially back when GPS came out, you couldn't make a filter sharp enough to reject high powered transmitters on nearby frequencies. It's still difficult, if not impossible, to do the filtering without decreasing the receiver sensitivity so much that it can't pick up the satellites under normal conditions, which includes poor weather. Granted, new receivers could probably be built with better rejection w/o significant loss of sensitivity, but the military and FCC set up the rules correctly for the technology back in the day--adjacent frequencies for low power satellite transmission only. LS wants to change those rules, regardless of harm to others.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Especially the part about "not filtering out non-GPS spectrum _as they are required to_ on all devices".
Here, I'll just leave this here.
Well, and this one for completeness.
So if I propose a communication system that involves shouting loudly through a megaphone across the street and the environment agency shuts it down, not only could I sue them but all the house-builders who did not provide adequate sound insulation?
Yes. Keeping with the analogy, shouting over a megaphone would be a valid communication system in many other neighborhoods, just not that particular one. You'd think that if house builders knew that it would be possible, or probable, that this kind of communication system would eventually be in use, they'd build their houses accordingly. But this particular subdivision builder cheaped out on sound insulation.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Try getting some reading comprehension and some clue! Filtering out the interference caused by (many orders of magnitude) strong(er than the GPS satellite transmission) transmissions in a frequency band so close to the one GPS uses is Nontrivial in the 'Physics doesn't work quite like that' sense.
Except that when these houses were built there were noise ordinances in effect for many years, and they still are in effect now. Now megaphone man comes in and says 'damn the noise ordinances, I am going to use my megaphone anyway'. And when he gets slapped down, he cries about the house builders.
And it wouldn't bow to cash or politics ... 'nough said.
There are more important things than wireless internet access. Instead of stomping on a valuable service such as GPS, total available bandwidth can be easily increased by decreasing spacing between towers and thus making more frequent re-use of the assigned frequencies.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
If you don't have a cell phone, don't have electricity (allow me to doubt that) and deal only in cash, then I agree that you would have not be affected. The issue was never only about consumer devices. You may not realize, but GPS is used for precise timing in wireless cellphone towers and other communications systems, financial networks, the power grid, FAA weather reporting, and many other things, all of which would have been affected by LightSquared.
I didn't read anything that suggested that was true. Can you provide a link that says anything other than consumer grade GPS was affected?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The GPS makers took advantage of the lack of adjacent channels to cheap out on the filters. The GPS industry has no license relating to the spectrum in question, they are listening on it by virtue of having poor filters. If the spectrum involved was adjacent to something less important like ISM band (wifi routers etc.) or ham radio, the FCC would probably have said "by better filters you idiots, you only bought the bit you are sitting on ". But this is a case where if you screw up big enough not only to affect yourself, but everyone else, everyone else has your back. To be completely fair though, enough power would overload any filter and designing for the environment is part of it, so the FCC puts quiet things next to sensitive things, and groups loud things together to give similar dynamic range. In short, the FCC is doing their job, the GPS folks kind of didn't but not in any criminal fashion.
Oh come on... why is it always the same load of garbage about "cheap filters" by the GPS manufacturers from armchair EE's. If you have never designed a front end receiver or even had a basic class on signal processing, please stop posting this garbage.
Ok, now that's out of my system, let me highlight a couple points:
-Filter design isn't magic, there are lots of economical considerations to designing a filter. Designing a filter with a higher roll-off will add cost, size, weight, power consumption to your receiver.
-Filter design isn't magic, there are lots of technical considerations when you're designing a filter. Additional filtering can degrade your signals. They can round out the edges of your signals. This is detrimental to high precision devices which rely on clean signal edges for accurate positioning. Pass-band filters can introduce large amounts of phase shift the farther you move away from the center frequency. Wide phase shifts will destroy your GPS signal. These are just a few examples, and I'm sure there are plenty more that any other RF Engineer/EE can think of with a little time.
-Filter design isn't magic...
Even one of the "solutions" introduced by a GPS manufactuerer (google Javaad), is only capable of solving part of the type of problem being introduced by LightSquared. The filter only has enough roll-off to reliably reject the lower 10MHz that LightSquared wants to use and not the upper 10MHz. The filter is relatively cheap ($25), but bulky (use of a ceramic filter). Additionally, there is limited test data on his filter, and I haven't been able to find any information about the phase response of the filter.
because it will only drive up the price of their bicycles