Lightsquared Interference Saga

Reading between the lines, the Lightsquared interference issue is
coming front and center as a major telecommunications policy issue.

Reference:

http://www.insidegnss.com/node/2589

'The ExCom has requested a meeting with White House, FCC,
LightSquared, and other federal agency officials to discuss the
situation'.

Under ordinary circumstances the details of facilities licensing would
routinely be handled by the FCC bureaucracy. But, not in this case!
Why is a meeting with the White House required?

Interference testing has been ongoing with government organized tests
conducted by NASA and FAA being completed. These agencies should
already know the extent of the problem. I'm thinking the entire
NextGen airspace program is in jeopardy.

Additionally, live sky testing conducted at Holloman Airforce Base has
shown terrestrial interference in the vicinity of a Lightsquared tower
erected there.

http://www.gpsworld.com/government/emergency-response/news/first-responders-find-lightsquared-interference-with-emergency-se

The technically voluminous May 16 Lightsquared Working Group report
has appeared on the FCC comment page. Interesting, in the preface,
Lightsquared is enlisting the participation of a filter company in
response to its interference mitigation tasks.

Otherwise you'd need to be a radio engineer to read it! But the
report is indicative of intense technical work that should have been
performed before the Lightsquared license modification was blindly
approved.

So, back to the White House, it goes something like this:

Folks, we have a really big problem. This GPS thing is looking very
bad. We've ripped open a hornet's nest here .. we need a political
solution and we need it fast.

--- CHAS

On Tue, 17 May 2011 09:45:48 -0700 (PDT), HIPAR wrote:

Because the SEC may need to beat up on the FCC *as well as* LightSquared
and Harbinger. Which means keeping the next layer of management
informed. They suspect that this is a corruption case, not a "merely" a
technical problem. It's also going to run afoul of one of the White
House's favored projects (broadband for everyone).

[..]


To put it mildly.

--
I picked up a Magic 8-Ball the other day and it said 'Outlook not so
good.' I said 'Sure, but Microsoft still ships it.'
-- Anonymous

It looks like the Democratic traditional backroom deals politics has
reached new heights.
Clearly someone is being paid off big time to make this happen.
I have even less respect for the traditional republican politicians...
But this shows how they're both typical scum.
Anyone that understand the laws of eletromagnetism and the reality of
GPS devices would have told the politicians that this was a very bad
idea. But when big money talks...
Obama wake up. Continue like that and you will loose your re-election.
The world need more engineers, less lawyers and less politicians.
Engineers create, lawyers and politicians destroy and lie.

Marcelo Pacheco

From a naive viewpoint, this sort of thing may have motivated some
unwary souls to back the Lightsquared proposal:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/technology/22iht-broadband22.html

"South Korea already boasts the world=92s fastest Internet connections =97
the fastest globally by far =97 but that is hardly good enough for the
government here.

The country intends to connect every home in the country to the
Internet at one gigabit per second by the end of 2012. That would be a
tenfold increase from its already blazing national standard today and
more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the
United States.

. . . The South Korean project will also increase wireless broadband
services tenfold.

. . . South Koreans now pay an average of $38 a month for connections
at 100 megabits per second to the Internet, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay
$46 for service that is molasses by comparison."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9093991.stm

"The government is encouraging enterprise to spend the 34 trillion Won
(=A319bn), required to complete the scheme. By way of a comparison, that
figure is roughly the same as the nation's annual education budget.

In theory, this idea will give many homes in South Korea a connection
speed 500 times faster than is guaranteed in the UK.

In practice, South Korea is already considered the country quickest
for broadband. The current average connection, according to a report
by web firm Akamai, is 12Mbps - the highest in the world.

. . . only 10% of data transfer is through 3G networks, 70% coming
through wi-fi - which is not that surprising when you consider the
number of hotspots in South Korea's urban areas."

There may be darker motives in the Lightsquared case, but what was
that old saying about a road paved with good intentions?

=97

Its 10x cheaper to equip a densely populated, mainly urban population
(almost no suburbia) country with broadband.
Bringing US, Brazil or Canada with the same broadband standard as
South Korea, Hong Kong or Japan is a huge goal.
Brazil is suffering from a clear shortage of fiber optic trained
installation labor. It's easy to teach someone with high school
education how to do fiber splices and how to install long fiber runs,
but with our (Brazilian) literacy standards "someone who can write
their own name, just one year of education", there just ain't enough
people with high school education available. Even the most basic
labor, civil construction is unable to obtain enough people that are
hard workers, they can't afford to fire the crappy workers anymore.
To compound that, thief of copper cables is rampant in low income,
poverty ridden, high drug traffic neighborhoods in the peripheral
areas of major metro areas.

Marcelo Pacheco