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Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Fat Lady Sings For LightSquared





It is no secret that LightSquared was a favorite investment of the Obama administration. Donald Gips, an Obama campaign funds bundler, who was rewarded for his efforts with an ambassadorship made $500,000 on his LightSquared stock options ten days after the FCC granted the company the conditional waiver to build out its 4G LTE network on radio spectrum designated for satellite use only. Senator Obama invested $50,000 in Skyterra which was transformed into LightSquared by Obama donor Philip Falcone. I ventured a guess that LightSquared was team Obama's retirement plan. If that is the case then Obama needs to win the next election very badly or he and Michelle may have to live out their lives in the middle class.


The latest news on LightSquared is it cannot be fixed. Evidently the yet undeveloped, inexpensive filter that we heard so much about but strangely never saw will not work which means the price of continuing the conditional waiver is most of the GPS system which includes missile guidance, air traffic control, a host of applications in surveying, construction, and agriculture, and our own Garmin and TomTom GPS navigational aids.




A special board formed to advise the federal government on the clash between Global Positioning System receivers and LightSquared’s proposed cellular/satellite communications network has concluded there are “no practical solutions or mitigations” that would allow the two to coexist on adjacent segments of the radio spectrum.


The National Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Committee, in a letter released this afternoon, said it had reached the “unanimous conclusion” that the LightSquared network would “cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers” as well as a GPS-powered ground-alert system overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.


“Based upon this testing an analysis, there appear to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.”



On assumes that "no additional testing is warranted at this time.” means the ballgame is over. Find another way to feather your nest, team Obama. It gets worse. The National Defense Authorization Act created restrictions on the FCC to ensure that current GPS services remain free of interference, and it must report every 90 days for the next two years on that status. With two governmental bodies reporting to the FCC that LightSquared's system substantially interferes with GPS systems in commercial, military, and personal applications, there is almost certainly no legal way that the FCC can sign off on Philip Falcone’s attempt to build a 4G network on the cheap.

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