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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.
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.
You're confusing things. Lightsquared wants to use a different band than other existing ones, that's the issue here. No LTE implementation in Europe uses the band Lightsquared wishes to use.
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
I think in the EU it is on a different band. I have 9 sats GPS reception even when standing within 5m of a LTE base station antenna. If the frequencies were near, the GPS signal being as weak as it is, it would require a black magic receiver to work.
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.
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.
Most GPS equiptment on... airplanes are a lot older and less resistant. The GPS in your phone is better than the GPS on an (older) aircraft.
Not really. The onboard aircraft mode C transponder is a couple watts around 1090-ish MHz which is not too far from the GPS spectrum, so they're tougher than you'd think. Thats before you get to the zillion watt air band voice transmitters, admittedly at a much lower frequency. Then again they're probably older. Then again, microwave filter technology was pretty much figured out in the 50s and not too much has changed since then. Then again microwave amp technology has drastically improved over the past two decades or so WRT MMICs and IP3 and IMD specs, so a new cellphone Might perform better than aircraft instruments. Then again, the whole "subscription model" for GPS maps and autoloaded waypoints means there are not as many "old" aircraft GPS out there as you'd think, compared to say, old altimeters or old airspeed gauges.
Theoretically there probably exists a GPS moving map display where the manufacturer hasn't shipped current nav data since '97 therefore it lays in the junk pile unused although theoretically if you'd power it up on the bench and compare to a 2012 iphone GPS, the iphone might outperform it. maybe.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
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?
The thing is, aircraft with multiple RF interfaces are specifically designed with co-interference between onboard systems in mind. For example, antenna locations are chosen VERY carefully to avoid one system interfering with another, and in addition, most aircraft have an interference blanker system that allows receivers on the aircraft to know when another system is transmitting. You can't have an IBU for an offboard interference source.
In addition, while fairly high in peak transmit power, IFF has a VERY low duty cycle, and in fact has some very strict duty cycle limitations imposed on it specifically because of interference concerns. Last but not least, 1090 MHz is MUCH farther in frequency from GPS L1 (1575 MHz) than LightSquared is (1526-1536 MHz), meaning that it's going to be attenuated much more by the frontend filters of GPS receivers. Obtaining significant rejection at 1090 MHz is MUCH easier to do without size/weight/inband attenuation penalties than obtaining significant rejection for nearly continuous high-duty-cycle interference at 1536 MHz.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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!
In addition, while fairly high in peak transmit power, IFF has a VERY low duty cycle, and in fact has some very strict duty cycle limitations imposed on it specifically because of interference concerns. Last but not least, 1090 MHz is MUCH farther in frequency from GPS L1 (1575 MHz) than LightSquared is (1526-1536 MHz), meaning that it's going to be attenuated much more by the frontend filters of GPS receivers. Obtaining significant rejection at 1090 MHz is MUCH easier to do without size/weight/inband attenuation penalties than obtaining significant rejection for nearly continuous high-duty-cycle interference at 1536 MHz.
Yes but I was thinking of R-squared issues. So a 1 watt transponder at 1090 at maybe as little as 5 feet away vs 100 watts from LS maybe a couple miles away (miles straight down?).
Also there are issues w/ filters. So I do microwave RF work. Some MMICs I work with don't tolerate more than 20 dBmW at the input without physically frying. No problemo, you only need 10 dB of filtering a 1090 MHz 1 watt source to prevent physical damage, assuming you plugged the transponder antenna port directly into the preamp input port. 10 dB at a "third of an octave away" (depending how you do your math) is not an overly heroic engineering achievement, BUT that comes at an insertion loss of maybe a couple dB which comes Right Off The Top of my system noise figure which ruins my overall system SNR. Why even waste time and money on an exotic HEMT front end if the required front end filter results in system performance as cruddy as an old (bulletproof) bipolar transistor...
So much for hard core engineering. Now for the heresay... I also do microwave ham radio work and people with more experience than myself claim driving a rover 1296 MHz station down the road next to an airport will inevitably result in the preamp frying from the radar interregator and/or individual plane transponders. Since I live 3 blocks from an airport I don't seriously bother with the 1296 band, that and its a big hobby, plenty other stuff to do. Also old fashioned analog AMPS cell towers were supposedly the death of many a hilltoppers 902 MHz preamp. Comments? Its just heresay, but I just keep on hearing it and it is technically believable...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.