House GOP Members Grill FCC Officials on LightSquared

The chiefs of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) and International Bureau defended the agency’s transparency in its decision to grant LightSquared a conditional waiver and told lawmakers that GPS stakeholders should have notified the FCC of potential interference concerns much sooner. International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre said the GPS industry did not weigh in on interference issues until nearly 10 years after LightSquared’s predecessor-in-interest Mobile Satellite Ventures first petitioned the commission in 2001. OET Chief Julius Knapp told lawmakers in his opening remarks that in November 2010, “the GPS industry was not complaining about out-of-band emissions or interference caused by handsets, or the power levels authorized for the L-band -- they were instead notifying us of their own receivers potentially picking up signals from the neighboring band.”

The conflict between GPS and mobile satellite services involved unfiltered or poorly filtered GPS legacy devices receiving signals from the spectrum of neighboring users, creating a receiver overload, the FCC officials said in their joint remarks. The interference does not result from mobile satellite service ATC L-band users emitting signals into the GPS spectrum, they said, but is a result of legacy GPS devices listening into the band next door to them. They said the commission is doing a receiver performance workshop and the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council plans to report its review of the issue in the next few weeks.

Stearns concluded that it is “unsound policy to allow 40 MHz of spectrum to sit fallow, while at the same time seek to relocate broadcasters and federal users off their spectrum to free up more space for wireless use.” He asked Knapp if they thought there was a solution to the problem. Knapp told Stearns there “is no easy way to fix” the bleeding over from the thousands of legacy GPS devices in use. “Until you work through the problems we don’t know what the answers are,” said Knapp. “I can’t describe what the solution would be. There are a number of ideas on the table.” LightSquared Founder Philip Falcone recently said the company is seeking new spectrum sharing scenarios and a potential spectrum swap with the Department of Defense that will help the company emerge in a “better place” from a regulatory standpoint (CD Aug 22 p4).

Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., was unsatisfied with the FCC’s response: “Isn’t this a situation of squatters and squatters rights? … We need to straighten this thing out and make it clear to everybody that the federal government can make it whole and will not allow squatting to supercede the due process. Once you start allowing people to claim a right for using a right of way that was not set aside for, the only alternative is eventually for the government to put up regulatory jersey walls so that option is no longer available in the future,” he said, referring to concrete barriers that run down the middle of highways.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., separately pressed the witnesses to explain whether the FCC and the White House had discussions over whether LightSquared could serve as an alternative spectrum partner. Neither Knapp nor De La Torre said they were aware of such discussions.

Ranking Member Diana DeGette, D-Colo., came to the commission’s defense and said the investigation into the agency’s handling of the LightSquared case “reveals a regulatory review process working as it should. … The FCC took the responsible steps that one would expect in order to resolve the problem.” The FCC was ultimately put in a position where it had to make “a no-win decision. Someone was going to end up being very unhappy.”

The FCC’s account of the proceedings is “deeply misguided and wrong,” said Jim Kirkland, vice president and general counsel of GPS company Trimble. “The suggestion that these interference issues should have been raised earlier by anyone ignores the FCC’s own statements and the relevant history, including that as recently as March 2010, in the National Broadband Plan, the FCC confirmed that only limited use of MSS spectrum to ‘fill in the gaps’ in satellite service was permitted under existing rules, and that any changes would require further proceedings,” he said in a separate news release. Kirkland also said the FCC officials ignored the critical spectrum interests of the U.S. government and Department of Defense “which owns and operates the GPS constellation and uses over a million GPS devices itself.” The officials’ comments about GPS equipment design are all “based on the assertion that the FCC put government and private industry on notice that ubiquitous terrestrial use of the mobile satellite band would be allowed. Since the FCC in fact said exactly the opposite up until 2010, GPS equipment was designed based upon the permitted, compatible use of the MSS band,” he said.

Stearns told us after the hearing: “It’s important to let new industries know that the FCC is going to be transparent and they are not going to go back on their support of industry … when they invest all this money. Secondly, I think we have got to realize that a lot of solutions have to come once the technical interference issues” are resolved. Stearns, a 12-term congressman who lost his primary race to Ted Yoho last month, was mum on his job prospects for 2013: “We're talking to people, but right now I still have a few months to go.”