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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."
They bought a license to transmit a candle's worth of power on a sattelite based band, and are sad that the FCC won't let them send an arclight's worth of signal out from ground based stations. Ars link.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
When the FCC first got involved they gave them a provisional approval which required LightSquared to prove that it would not affect GPS devices. LightSquared was unable to prove it. Ars Technica explains it pretty well here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/why-lightsquared-failed.ars
You haven't been following the story very closely, since you obviously don't know that Lightsquared got their original approval on a fast track basis, with very little review time, and across a holiday weekend. They knew full-well that their intended use couldn't stand up to any serious scrutiny. If you think that just happened, without their pushing very hard through back channels, you really don't know how the FCC works. Lightsquared have only themselves to blame for trying to short-cut the process, and expecting political pressure to win out over technical facts (although that last one is often a good bet to make).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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!
* LightSquared gets an assignment of free spectrum
One they had for a while and with terms explicitly preventing them from using the spectrum for terrestrial broadcast.
* LightSquared invests tons of money
Irrelevent.
* The GPS industry has been violating FCC rules by not filtering out non-GPS spectrum _as they are required to_ on all devices. Independent tests say 75% are not FCC-compliant
LOL what rules? You don't need to meet any GPS specific requirements or approval specific to building a GPS receiver. FCC only has say over units that transmit a signal.
* The FCC performs tests with models chosen from said 75%
There is no such thing!
* The FCC states that the risk is too large and destroys LightSquared's business model, assets and tells them they are not allowed to use their spectrum.
They can use their spectrum as long as they do it within the limits stipulated when they purchased it including the ATC integrated services rule.
In my opinion, the willful neglect by the GPS manufacturers requires them to fix it at own cost.
All of the points are factually incorrect. Please take some time reevaluate.