Despite evidence of the likelihood for harmful interference to nearby GPS and other GNSS L1 signals, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appears likely to push ahead with approval of a revised LightSquared Subsidiary plan to build a dense U.S. network of high-powered ground transmitters for wireless broadband service.
As clock runs down for filing comments on LightSquared’s revised request to begin service using a 10-megahertz chunk in the lower portion of the 1525-1559 MHz band, participants and observers of the controversial plan say that the FCC appears to be trying to issue a decision by Labor Day or mid-September at the latest. The schedule appears to be driven more by LightSquared’s need to meet financial milestones than FCC processes for due diligence, they say.
High-precision applications include such activities as large-scale farming, construction, surveying, time synchronization, crustal monitoring, and military operations. Numerous submissions from agriculture-related organizations are among those flooding into the FCC’s LightSquared comments database.
The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has scheduled a hearing on “Impacts of the LightSquared Network” before the full committee from 10:00 a.m. to noon on August 3.
GPS advocates believe that the FCC violated its own procedures by allowing a substantive change in frequency allocation to occur at the bureau level rather before the full commission. They believe that political influences, driven by Harbinger’s billions and the president’s desire to lift up expansion of wireless broadband as a feature of his re-election campaign, have shaped not merely the FCC decisions on the issue but the agency’s processes themselves.
An FCC spokeswoman appeared to telegraph a foregone FCC conclusion by adding that the company’s project “has the potential to create thousands of jobs and generate billions of dollars of economic investment.”
Read the whole article at: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/2721