LightSquared asked the FCC on Tuesday to
adopt self-serving standards on GPS receivers.
Today, a top government agency came out
with some suggestions of its own, and they won't benefit LightSquared.
Transportation Department Deputy
Secretary John Porcari told lawmakers at a Wednesday congressional hearing that
the agency plans to work with the NTIA on regulations that would ban services
that interfere with GPS.
As we all know by now, LightSquared is
one of those services.
Calling LightSquared “fundamentally
incompatible” with GPS, Porcari said the DOT proposed to work with the NTIA on
standards that would prohibit the use of spectrum adjacent to GPS bands for
services that would interfere with the technology – services like
LightSquared’s proposed LTE network.
"It would let operators know in
advance which uses in adjacent bands would and would not be compatible with
GPS," he said in testimony before the House Aviation Subcommittee.
The subcommittee's hearing took place two days after the Senate passed a bill that provided $11 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade its radar-based air traffic control system to GPS.
Government tests show LightSquared’s
powerful signals drown out a broad swath of GPS receivers, particularly
sensitive high-precision equipment used to land planes, direct missiles and
guide farm equipment.
Wide-band GPS receivers listen in to
neighboring bands to calculate more precise coordinates. Until LightSquared
came along, the eavesdropping wasn’t an issue because mobile satellite services
operating in adjacent bands emitted only faint signals that didn’t affect
receivers.
“GPS was put in a quiet piece of
spectrum on purpose because it fundamentally needs to have quiet neighbors,” he
said.
The regulations would act as a neighborhood
association, keeping the spectrum block quiet for its most important residents.
LightSquared wasn’t invited to testify
at the hearing, since it was ostensibly about protecting GPS in general and
didn’t have a specific focus on its LTE plans, but the bulk of testimony and
questions still focused on the impact of LightSquared’s operations on the
critical navigation system.
LightSquared was peeved at its
exclusion, calling it “outrageous” and one-sided.
“It’s outrageous that a congressional
hearing set up to examine factual issues was only focused on one side of the
story - a side of the story supported by
commercial GPS makers who designed faulty devices that depend on using spectrum
licensed to LightSquared,” a company spokesman said in a statement.
LightSquared blames GPS manufacturers
for making poorly designed receivers that are especially susceptible to
interference. The GPS industry argues that its receiver designs worked fine
before LightSquared got a waiver from the FCC to blast high-power signals in
what had formerly been a quiet spectrum band.
LightSquared claimed last summer its
revised deployment plan would largely fix the problem, but recently released
government tests showed the service still knocked out GPS.
The company says the tests were rigged
and has accused the government of colluding with the GPS industry.
Porcari said at the hearing that the
results had been independently verified by the Idaho National Laboratory and
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, neither of which is affiliated with GPS industry.
“The results were unacceptable,” he said.
Porcari’s statements were echoed by
other witnesses at the hearing, which included representatives from the
aviation industry and the director of George Washington University's Space
Policy Institute.
The FCC has the final say in the matter.
The waiver it granted to LightSquared last January stipulates the company
address the GPS interference issue before launch.