One of my favorite news items from the summer of 2010 was a story about a scrappy new operator called LightSquared that was aiming to compete with America’s largest operators by launching a national wholesale LTE network. The goal was to build the fastest and dumbest pipe the country had ever seen, and then let businesses handle the customer relations bit. LightSquared seemed like a perfect solution to America’s non-competitive wireless landscape, yet here we are, nearly 18 months after we first heard about these guys, and the company isn’t anywhere close to achieving their vision. The problem isn’t that they have a lack of funding, or that they don’t have enough spectrum, it’s that the spectrum they do have sits way too close to the same bands that GPS uses. Initial testing of a LightSquared cell tower showed that pretty much anything a 20+ mile radius of said tower couldn’t get a GPS fix. Several solutions were proposed, from lowering the power output of their as yet to be deployed cell towers, using the spectrum they own that’s farthest away from GPS, and even retrofitting existing GPS devices with a filter to prevent interference.
In the end though the nine federal agencies that make up the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee (PNT ExComm for short) came to a unanimous conclusion that LightSquared poses a serious threat to GPS. Now PNT ExComm doesn’t have the final say as to whether or not LightSquared will be allowed to build their network, the FCC does, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the FCC isn’t going to let LightSquared build their network.
Is this a bad thing? Not really. Another company wants to break into America’s wireless market, one that you’d never think would want to do so: Dish Network. They have 40 MHz worth of spectrum that they want to use to launch an LTE-Advanced network. Now all they need is approval from the FCC to do that, and we can’t imagine them running into too many hurdles.