I’ve been hearing about a new company called LightSquared a lot recently. Both arstechnica and alarm:clock have both had interesting articles on the company in the last week.
The goal of LS is to create from scratch a nationwide 4G wireless network – and funder Philip Falcone thinks they can do it for about $15B. That’s a pretty impressive number, in my book, especially when compared to how much AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have spent over the last decades building-out their networks.
The ars article points-out that the GPS industry is upset that LS is using a similar spectrum to the one used by the global position satellite system, and are worried it will make GPS receivers act poorly by overpowering the satellite signal.
Personally, I think that if your devices are built so poorly that a non-identical signal can interfere with their functionality, you have an issue on your hands – not on the hands of the folks with the similar signal. Also, LightSquared could take it upon themselves to be a private, terrestrial location service – either by repeating signals from the GPS constellation, or by adding location data to the signal they are broadcasting (40 000 towers with multiple antennae per tower ought to be able to send some useful data over the air along with everything else being carried).
Moving back to the future of the business, it looks like a very exciting time in the telecom industry in the US – like we may finally get some “real” competition to the Big Three already operating. If AT&T’s T-Mobile acquisition goes through, cell phone and wireless broadband competition would be hurt – so I’m thrilled that groups like LightSquared are coming out to play, too.
As a sidebar: Tarus, you should get in front of Philip – they’re going to need some serious monitoring 🙂
I take it from your post that you are not a radio person. Radio signals, while they may be listed at a particular frequency also take up spectrum to either side of the listed frequency. Some signals may take up very large portions of the spectrum on either side of a listed frequency. In addition, the way transmitters work, there may also be signals on various harmonics of a listed frequency. Generally, the way this has been handled is to leave large spaces between assigned frequencies so that interference doesn’t happen. But, over the past few years, the FCC has shown increasing interest in squeezing out those spaces. If I was more cynical I might say that they’ve been doing that because of the money the government gets from selling frequencies (or the perks and jobs FCC commissioners get from the industry after leaving the FCC), but no matter what the reasoning the technical limitation still exists and wishing it otherwise is unlikely to change it.
I do know that there is a bit of bleed-over, but that shouldn’t be a major issue, unless you’re cramming signals extremely closely: the separation on the AM dial is as small as 10Khz in some areas – it *seems* like (from only a basically-informed individual) the differences in signal frequencies between LightSquared and the GPS system shouldn’t be a Big Deal™