The FCC’s plan to block LightSquared’s wireless broadband network plans would breach the regulator’s agreement with the company and violate its rights, LightSquared said in a filing.
The FCC was not immediately available for comment on Monday…
The FCC’s plan to block LightSquared’s wireless broadband network plans would breach the regulator’s agreement with the company and violate its rights, LightSquared said in a filing.
The FCC was not immediately available for comment on Monday before normal working hours in the US.
On Friday, LightSquared filed its comments on the FCC’s decision to block the planned network rollout due to the interference caused on GPS systems by LightSquared’s technology.
LightSquared said that “the harm to the public interest from the actions proposed in the [FCC’s] public notice would be enormous and quantifiable, as would the damages to LightSquared resulting from the Commission’s breach of its agreement with LightSquared and its violation of LightSquared’s constitutional rights”.
In an accompanying statement, LightSquared said that the FCC’s decision would lead to “regulatory uncertainty” and would discourage “needed investment in this nation’s wireless infrastructure”.
LightSquared specified that it had already invested over US$4bn in the project. It added that it has made moves to “extend its financial runway” and would continue investing in solutions that could allow its technology to coexist with GPS.
LightSquared also claimed in its statement that technical problems identified by the US government were based on a “deeply flawed and biased testing process”.
16 March was the deadline for comments on the FCC’s decision.
In its own filing, the Coalition to Save Our GPS, a GPS industry lobby group, called on the FCC to revoke the conditional authority it had previously given to LightSquared. This would have allowed the company to offer its network, if the GPS interference issue had been resolved.
The coalition claimed that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the government agency that reported on LightSquared, and “nearly all parties” that had evaluated the company’s original and modified plans, had found that they would cause “devastating interference to GPS”.
