LightSquared Officials Still Hope for Quick FCC Approval
Most GPS interference problems can be solved quickly using low-cost fixes for GPS receivers, LightSquared officials said Thursday during a press briefing. Meanwhile, other LightSquared officials said at a financial conference the company’s financial future, as well as its contract with Sprint Nextel, remain viable.
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"Some people have claimed that the GPS interference issue is going to cost billions of dollars to fix and tens of years to fix,” said Martin Harriman, LightSquared executive vice president-ecosystem development. “They were wrong. Private industry and innovative companies are going to fix this problem in a number of weeks. … Top engineering is what is needed to attack this problem quickly.”
Harriman said most precision GPS receivers can be fixed by changing an external antenna and others can be refitted to address interference problems that might occur. The solutions LightSquared presented only address the lower 10 MHz of the L band, which LightSquared plans to use first, he said. “It has taken a matter of weeks if not days to produce a solution,” Harriman said. “We know that a solution for the upper 10 [MHz] is much harder. … We're focused on getting the business moving, getting it up and running, using the spectrum that we know is compatible today with GPS.” LightSquared needs more time to work out problems in the upper 10 MHz, he said, but “We're not going to say today we're going to give up the top 10 MHz. Why would we do that?”
Harriman introduced Javad Ashjaee, CEO of Javad GNSS, a company that builds GPS receivers, which is working with LightSquared on low-cost fixes for existing receivers. “Technology does exist,” Ashjaee said. “Engineers are locked into rooms [working] and people that don’t know what they are talking about, but they carry big titles, get into the way of smart engineers and tell Congress and other people a solution doesn’t exist.”
Meanwhile, LightSquared Chief Financial Office Michael Montemarano told a Deutsche Bank financial conference Thursday LightSquared’s proposed network sharing deal with Sprint remains critical to both companies. The contract contains “unwind” provisions if LightSquared is unable to meet various milestones. “They're not cancellation provisions,” he said. “They get the parties back to the table to negotiate."
The first unwind provision kicked in in September and Sprint agreed to put off any decision until the end of the year, when the second will require further negotiations, Montemarano said. “The company’s expectation is between now and the end of the year we will get some sort of guidance out of the FCC to proceed,” he said. “It can have varying flavors. It could have staged roll out. It could have ‘avoid these markets’. It could say ‘avoid the precision devices on the Hoover Dam, don’t put an antenna near it.’ … There are ways to deploy around what the FCC would come forward with."
LightSquared is optimistic that a new round of testing ordered by NTIA will wrap up as planned next month, Montemarano said. “If the FCC is sincere about the National Broadband Plan we will hear something in time so we do not have to have a discussion on the unwind provision with Sprint,” he said. “My view is, if we had to, I think [Sprint] would be very accommodating."
Frank Boulben, LightSquared chief marketing officer, said the company has agreed to pay for fixes to all precision GPS devices used by the federal government, at a cost the company expects to be below $50 million. Still to be resolved are precision devices used in the agriculture, surveying, construction and other industries, he said. “We've asked the GPS industry to step up to the plate and help solve the problem they caused in the first place,” he said.
Boulben was asked about concerns raised by Gen. William Shelton, commander of the Air Force Space Command, at a hearing before a House Armed Services Committee panel (CD Sept 16 p1). Bolben said Shelton did not take into account that LightSquared had changed its proposal to only use the lower 10 MHz band. “Gen. Shelton mixed up our old bandplan with the new one,” he said. “With the old bandplan he would have been right. Most of the devices they use in the DOD would have had to be replaced or retrofitted. … With the new bandplan, where we are using only the spectrum that is further way from GPS, there are only a very small number of devices that have to be replaced or retrofitted.”