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LightSquared Wants To Share Weather-Balloon Frequencies for LTE

IDG News Service reports (as carried by PC World) that LightSquared, having lost some of the spectrum they'd hoped to use for a nationwide LTE network because of worries it would interfere with GPS service, has a new plan: to use some of the spectrum currently reserved by the federal government for uses like weather-balloon communications. From the article: "The new plan would give the carrier 30MHz of frequencies on which to operate the LTE network. That's 10MHz less than it had wanted but still comparable to the amount of spectrum Verizon Wireless and AT&T are using for their LTE systems, which in most areas use just 20MHz. Wireless network speeds are determined partly by how much spectrum the network uses, so LightSquared might be able to deliver a competitive service for its planned coverage area of 260 million U.S. residents."

2 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just pay for proper spectrum already! by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Uhhh...BAD analogy friend, because if the DoD is sitting on a class A and only using a couple of thousand addresses you could redistribute all of their unused ones and not change a single thing about how they work whereas with their first idea Lightsquared bought MUCH cheaper than normal priced communication frequencies because it was SAT ONLY and thus cheaper because you had to pay 100s of millions for the bird and launch, only Lightsquared didn't want to actually USE them for sats, they want to use them on the ground which would wipe out those that had already put up their sats" by overpowering their signals.

    Now here we see them again, wanting to pay little to nothing for a band ALREADY IN USE by balloons and weather sats which would again lose their ability to communicate while Lightsquared makes out like a bandit on their new franchise. With those sitting on millions of IP addresses redistributing the ones they aren't using while leaving them...ohh lets say 10,000+ extras in case they have huge growth down the line, would not affect what they are doing now one little bit, Lightsquared would royally fuck over the ones that paid to actually use that bandwidth correctly, only for them to again make out like bandits by getting the spectrum at fire sale prices.

    Please die already Lightsquared, nobody wants you, you're just trying to fuck people for your own gain, you're another VC funded leech on the ass of society and you needed to be burned off and disposed of. Either get your VC cronies to cough up the funds to buy spectrum legitimately, which of course they won't because the whole way they planned to make mad monies was by getting spectrum at fire sale prices instead of paying fair market value, or go the fuck away.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Re:Nice choice of spectrum by queazocotal · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Several reasons it's better.
    Firstly, weather balloons are a _LOT_ closer to the transmitter than GPS.
    300mW@100km is a much, much stronger signal than 50W at 40000km.

    Secondly, there are perhaps a few dozen stations that receive weather balloons, and these can be upgraded for well under a few thousand dollars each.
    It's not like GPS, where there are literally millions of receivers that may be affected.