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U.S. Government Moves To Protect GPS
By Graham Warwick
Washington
Spending millions of taxpayer dollars establishing whether a company’s business plan is viable is not usually government’s role, but in the case of wireless-broadband hopeful LightSquared versus the GPS community, the effort may yet change the way the U.S. regulates the use of frequency spectrum worth billions.
How one U.S. government agency could approve a business plan that jeopardizes a public utility other government entities consider vital to safety and security, not to mention the economy, is the key question that has lurked behind the battle between LightSquared and the GPS industry since it ignited in earnest a year ago.
The answer emerging from countless legal filings and Congressional hearings is that the government itself is the villain of the piece, the absence of collaboration between agencies allowing one to act without consulting the others. In bypassing its normal processes to expedite approval of LightSquared’s plan to use its mobile satellite service frequencies for a terrestrial broadband wireless network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) left its fellow Defense and Transportation Departments, Homeland Security and others, scrambling to protect GPS signals on which they now depend.