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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?
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.
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.
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.
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!