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LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy
fallen1 writes "Wireless broadband company LightSquared has filed for bankruptcy. In filings with U.S. Bankruptcy court, it was revealed that LightSquared had assets and debts of over $1 billion each. The decision followed a year-long fight between LightSqaured and GPS users — including some heavyweights like FedEx and UPS. Apparently Boeing and Alcatel-Lucent are heavily invested, but it would be interesting to see what the old Bell Labs could do with the technology."
This was decided way back at the final interference testing. This is merely formalizing the failure of the business.
1) Come up with profitable idea that violates the laws of physics
... well maybe not.
2) Use political influence to get around the laws of physics
3) PROFIT!
Did these guys have any significant technology? (Just askin, I really don't know. Even the Lightsquared Faq is fairly useless at explaining what they have that hasn't been done before)
And if they did, why not move it somewhere else to some radio spectrum where it will not interfere, such as, but not limited to some of the bandwidth Verizon is finding un-useful in the 700mhz band that they can't pawn off on anybody.
It seems to me that the only problem they had was a dependence on the wrong block of spectrum. On the other hand, any company that wants to push ahead with a spectrum usage with total disregard for existing spectrum use and the safety concerns of the entire GPS community probably isn't a company you want setting up this type of service in the first place.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah but that spectrum that wasn't useful for high power terrestrial transmissions was so much cheaper!
Lightsquared wanted to provide wireless internet at a price (not give). They also wanted to do it on the cheap so they could make money hand over fist. They failed.
Had they wanted to offer wireless at a fair price for a reasonable profit, they would have licensed spectrum appropriate for that application.
What?
They purchased air to ground spectrum and tried to re-purpose it as ground to ground spectrum. They sued when the FCC told them to go take a running jump.
Then tried to claim that GPS vendors were at fault for not having perfect notch filters in their equipment (hint such a thing is not physically possible)
Lightsquared anted to "SELL" internet to everyone, they certainly didn't want to give anything away.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The spectrum they bought was probably dirt cheap. No way to make a profit with spectrum that is more in demand.
Dirt cheap because nobody else would touch it (for good reason).
If GPS is the key to driverless cars, then I can just imagine how much fun the future prankster can have by setting an appropriately-tuned radio transmitter next to the side of the road.
Let's hope there's more to driverless cars than that.
If I can spot a major typo in the summary 2 seconds after seeing it for the first time ("Litesqaured" in this case) the you are not doing your fucking job.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It's all conspiracy bullshit. Their engineers had to know it was going to cause serious interference, and had to know that neither the FCC specifically, nor the US Government in general would ever let anyone trash GPS. It was an idiotic idea from the get-go, and now the company goes down the crapper for it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The spectrum they bought was probably dirt cheap. No way to make a profit with spectrum that is more in demand.
Dirt cheap because nobody else would touch it (for good reason).
Did you miss the part in TFA where it explained that "LightSquared invested $4 billion in airwaves"? 4 Billion is still a lot of money, at least where I come from. I suppose for a nationwide network it probably pales in comparison to what AT&T or Verizon hold, but it is still a substantial investment. I wonder if the FCC will give them a refund on all those unused EM rays?
Most people just see the GPS side of this fight, afraid of losing GPS in the continental U.S. In rreality it would have mostly affected those who needed extreme precision,
You mean like land surveyors and engineers. Yeah, people whose livelihoods depend on accurate GPS, because they build useless things like highways, bridges, airports, power plants, and other useless shit like that.
Get the fuck off of Slashdot.
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BMO
I'm sure the google car system uses everything that your average android device can use to determine it's location.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Did you miss the part in TFA where it explained that "LightSquared invested $4 billion in airwaves"? 4 Billion is still a lot of money, at least where I come from. I suppose for a nationwide network it probably pales in comparison to what AT&T or Verizon hold, but it is still a substantial investment. I wonder if the FCC will give them a refund on all those unused EM rays?
Oh sure, 4$ billion is a lot of money. Problem here is Verizon, AT&T, Sprint etc spent even more for spectrum space allotted for high power use and Light Squared was trying to buy cheap spectrum and then get the rules changed. There was no way they could afford spectrum allotted for this kind of use and make their business model work. The licenses they have purchased can be sold to pay their creditors, but I don't think the FCC is going to give them a refund.
Bye Bye Light Squared...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If there's one thing I've learned from management seminars, it's that "thinking outside the box" is a very powerful tool.
In fact, since I've started applying this principle in my daily life I have been able to do all sorts of things that the average guy wouldn't think are possible, such as levitate, wall through walls, bend spoons with the force of my will, and build perfect notch filters.
"(hint such a thing is not physically possible)" thinking outside the box!!?
My employer tells me to think outside the box but then sticks me in a cube...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
>Last I looked, (a week ago, but hey, maybe it's changed in the last 7 days) surveyors used transits and lasers, not GPS
You would be wrong.
Surveyors were using GPS before the "fuzzing" and after the fuzzing, surveyors were using Differential GPS (google this). Because the fuzzing was in one magnitude and direction it was trivial to correct for. Set up on a known point, correct for it, bam, your GPS now works like it did before the fuzzing.
Now that the charade of fuzzing is over, everybody uses GPS. Everyone. Especially now.
What you are also ignoring is the fact that the longer an antenna is left in one position and more satellites fly over, you get better and better resolution. Swinging a machete and cutting line takes time and costs money. If you can get a location by setting up on a point and gathering data for half a day instead of cutting line and running a traverse to get to it for two days, then you've come out way ahead.
The ultimate goal of land surveying is to be able to reconstruct a piece of land and who owns it even if it is vaporized by a nuclear explosion. GPS gives you this cheaply.
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BMO
Ask someone who has even a 100 level class in RF design under their belt.
It's not about modulation, it's about power levels required to make their receivers work at usable data speeds totally swamping the front ends of the adjacent GPS receivers.
They could lower power levels, but you have to obey Physics by giving up your data rate and wiz bang modulation techniques are not going to fix the problem for you. I suppose one could get a some pretty low data rate stuff (like under 300 baud) to work at some really low powers. But it's going to be very expensive for the data rate you can expect and you are still going to be causing GPS issues. But for only low data rates, there are other spectrum spaces that would be cheaper and easier that are not near GPS or anything else that would be an issue.
The problem here is that they simply could not hope to transmit at high enough data rates without jamming GPS in the process on the spectrum they purchased on the cheap.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The band Lightspeed bought is low-power ground/space. Lightspeed is free to use it for low-power ground/space communications all they want, in accordance with its current usage rules.
Lightspeed gambled they could con the FCC into allowing conversion to a different use, and to hell with the harm to anyone else. The FCC never promised that they would do so, allowed experiments to see if it could be made to work, and the experiments failed. Well, Las Vegas doesn't give refunds to gamblers either.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.