LightSquared Deployment Blocked by House Appropriations Committee
PC World’s online news reported that the House Appropriations Committee “passed a measure that would use Congress’ control of the FCC’s purse strings to stop the agency from letting LightSquared move forward.” The article quoted the Committee as stating, “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Federal Communications Commission to remove the conditions imposed on commercial terrestrial operations … until the Commission has resolved concerns of potential widespread harmful interference,” with GPS, said the text of the measure, an amendment to a funding bill. This seems to increase the pressure on LightSquared as this will likely further delay their deployment, or at least, curtail it. Given LightSquared’s desire to deploy a terrestrial system within 12-18 months, this places great pressure on their engineers to develop a system design that reconciles handset design, base station configuration, antenna design, etc. If LightSquared limits their terrestrial component to the 1 lower 10 MHz carrier in the 1500 MHz band, and are granted other slots in the AWS band (conjecture on my part) at 2100 MHz, the engineers have quite a frequency plan to resolve. This AWS frequency is 40% away from their allocated spectrum, and I believe it is upaired. This creates many issues on the selection of filters, receiver cards and base station equipment, as well as, the issue with the handsets. Engineers can be quite creative to finding solutions to all of these issues, provided their is sufficent money and budget to solve them. The engineers at LightSquared have quite a challenge ahead of them.