{"id":182,"date":"2011-10-19T05:53:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T11:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/?p=182"},"modified":"2011-10-19T05:54:30","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T11:54:30","slug":"lightsquared-and-gps-can-coexist-debate-over-potential-new-national-wireless-broadband-provider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/?p=182","title":{"rendered":"The Hill: Lightsquared and GPS can Coexist – debate over potential new national wireless broadband provider"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/thehill.com\/blogs\/congress-blog\/technology\/188259-lightsquared-and-gps-can-coexist<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a fascinating debate playing out in Washington that will impact nearly every American. It is over whether the federal government should allow an upstart company called LightSquared to enter the telecom market as a new national wireless broadband provider<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Anyone with a cell phone, computer or a tablet, should be paying attention, because LightSquared is proposing to build something that currently does not exist: a high-speed wireless system that reaches almost every corner of America, including underserved rural areas and over-capacity urban areas.<\/p>\n

LightSquared proposed investing $14 billion in private dollars on a plan that would bring wireless broadband to 260 million Americans by 2015, and create 15,000 jobs a year over the five-year build out of the network<\/strong>. LightSquared is a satellite company, and its unique model would create the nation\u2019s first broadband system that uses a combination of satellite and cell tower technology. Because satellite signals are ubiquitous, using them as a back up to terrestrial service would eliminate the massive service holes that still exist all over America, bringing high-speed internet for the first time to vast swaths of the country that have never had it.<\/p>\n

But of course, nothing is that easy \u2013 especially in Washington. The slice of spectrum the government licensed to LightSquared is next to the spectrum allocated to GPS<\/strong>, which is used broadly in America for both public and commercial purposes. And the GPS industry has launched a mighty lobbying and public relations campaign, rife with scare tactics designed to stoke partisan opposition and stop LightSquared<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Lost in the political hysteria is a crucial point: LightSquared\u2019s spectrum does not emit signals into GPS\u2019s spectrum. The company invested nearly $10 million in filtering technology to ensure that its signal dropped off a cliff before it crossed into GPS\u2019 spectrum. Through a series of regulatory actions in the early 2000s, the GPS industry was told it needed to develop filtering technology for its devices so that they wouldn\u2019t interfere with neighboring spectrum, but they failed to make these innovations<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The GPS industry and its friends in Washington persist in their opposition, scaring Americans into believing that LightSquared\u2019s signal will \u201cjam\u201d GPS, therefore dropping airplanes from the sky. Nonsense.<\/p>\n

The military has always claimed that its own precision devices were battle-hardened and resilient to sophisticated enemy jammers. But now the Pentagon is suggesting that a commercial operator like LightSquared can flip a switch and disable the U.S. defense system? Enemy jammers can be much closer to the GPS band and much more sophisticated than the benign signal format of a civilian signal like LightSquared. Surely, military receivers must have protections currently available for civilian GPS receivers that would prevent this.<\/p>\n

Former FCC official Michael Marcus, a spectrum use expert, also recognizes this incongruity and wrote in his blog:\u00a0\u201cIs this all it takes to disrupt the military\u2019s multibillion dollar critical investment in GPS that is so critical to our national security? If so, there is an urgent problem at hand and it is not just the LightSquared issue, it is the extreme fragility of military GPS systems! More likely, however, is that the proposed system will have no impact on military users but that the whole GPS community is \u2018circling the wagons\u2019 in an \u2018all for one, one for all\u2019 strategy to protect a few GPS manufacturers who made odd design decisions in their receivers<\/strong>\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/thehill.com\/blogs\/congress-blog\/technology\/188259-lightsquared-and-gps-can-coexist There is a fascinating debate playing out in Washington that will impact nearly every American. It is over whether the federal government should allow an upstart company called LightSquared to enter the telecom market as a new national wireless … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-news-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gbvdems.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}