US satellite/terrestrial venture LightSquared has blamed GPS device manufacturers for causing interference with its technology, thus delaying the roll-out of its LTE network.
LightSquared said that GPS test results, which it filed with the FCC today,…
US satellite/terrestrial venture LightSquared has blamed GPS device manufacturers for causing interference with its technology, thus delaying the roll-out of its LTE network.
LightSquared said that GPS test results, which it filed with the FCC today, showed “unequivocally” that the interference has been caused by GPS device manufacturers’ decision to make products over the last eight years that depend on using spectrum assigned to other FCC licensees.
It argued that the GPS industry could have avoided the problem by equipping their devices over the last few years with a device costing as little as five cents.
It also said that the GPS industry had been “largely uninterested in finding a win-win solution” and that the industry’s only solution “to a problem of their own making” had been to demand the government block LightSquared from using its own spectrum.
LightSquared also said in its statement that it had found a “comprehensive solution” to the GPS interference issue.
It outlined the three basic parts of this solution in submissions to Congress earlier this week.
Firstly, it will lower the power level used by its base stations. Secondly, it will stop using the upper 10MHz block of spectrum in the L-band, which is close to the GPS band and prone to cause interference. Finally, it will start terrestrial operations only in those parts of the spectrum that pose “no risk” to the majority of GPS users.
LightSquared claims that this approach will resolve interference issues with 99.5% of GPS commercial devices.
The GPS industry’s “Save Our GPS” coalition gave short shrift to LightSquared’s arguments.
It said that the report submitted to the FCC today showed that LightSquared’s proposed operations defy the laws of physics and would not work.
Jim Kirkland, a VP at the GPS device maker Trimble, said: “With the filing of the FCC working group report, all the studies are now in and provide consistent and overwhelming evidence that LightSquared’s proposed operations would cause massive interference to every type of GPS device, even devices in outer space.
“There is no current, existing technology that solves this interference, only unproven claims of hypothetical future fixes,” he added.
