LightSquared Has Answered Interference Questions but Still Faces Resistance as Industry Disruptor, Says Executive
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- LightSquared is “very confident that we'll get a positive signal” from regulators “to get our network up and running,” after giving federal agencies two prototype filters Thursday that it said prove the operation doesn’t need to interfere with precision GPS, an executive said. Interference has been a “problem for less than 0.5 percent of devices in the market and we've now found a solution to it,” said Patrick Parodi, vice president-ecosystem development.
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LightSquared has made it “very clear that we don’t want to affect” the GPS business, Parodi said at the Carrier Connections conference of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. Executive Vice President Jeffrey Carlisle of LightSquared told reporters Wednesday about one device that the company planned to offer officials to dispel interference worries (CD Sept 15 p7). Parodi declined to square his discussion of two filters with Carlisle’s statements.
But Parodi cast the company’s problems in Washington as not mainly technical and suggested that they come mostly from unspecified companies that it would compete with. “This business is notorious for this kind of issue, especially when you're going to come in and disrupt the industry,” he said. “A lot of people aren’t delighted to see LightSquared come into the market,” because a rail-thin cost structure will allow it to wholesale wireless at a small “fraction” of competitors’ prices, he said.
LightSquared will seek customers among consumer electronics makers and high-tech companies like Google, in addition to foreign carriers seeking to break in to the U.S. market and current American communications providers such as CLECs and cable operators, Parodi said. Intermediaries like Simplexity and Accenture will offer customers from outside communications services the back and front office services they need, he said.
The company recently opened in Mountain View an innovation center the first in a series planned around the U.S. and “potentially around the world,” Parodi said. The 8,000-square-foot LightSquared SandBox, which hasn’t been formally announced, is the only one in the U.S. that allows developers and customers to work with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, satellite networks, 2G, 3G and LTE, he said.
Unlike competitors, “we're opening up our network entirely to third parties,” Parodi said. “We're entirely agnostic” about the applications that will run on LightSquared’s network, he said. Parodi offered a long list of technologies whose development LightSquared is encouraging for its network: VoIP, video, music streaming, immersive multiplayer games, mobile analytics, digital advertising, location-based services, security, digital rights management, social media, smart grid, machine-to-machine communications, telematics, mobile health and cloud computing.