LightSquared Broadband Plan Is Dead for Now


By Wayne Rash
eWeek.com

The Federal Communications Commission has effectively killed LightSquared's plan to build its own terrestrial wholesale 4G data delivery system. The FCC's action followed a letter from the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) that found LightSquared's original and modified plans for its proposed mobile network would cause harmful interference to the nation's GPS receivers.

The Feb. 14 NTIA letter also noted that the Federal Aviation Administration had concluded that the LightSqared proposed data network would interfere with aviation safety-of-flight systems, and that no practical solutions or mitigations would be found over the course of the next few years.

With mounting evidence that the company's plan was unworkable, the FCC announced that LightSquared's time was up.

"The Commission will not lift the prohibition on LightSquared," said FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun. "The International Bureau of the Commission is proposing to (1) vacate the Conditional Waiver Order, and (2) suspend indefinitely LightSquared's Ancillary Terrestrial Component authority to an extent consistent with the NTIA letter. A Public Notice seeking comment on NTIA's conclusions and on these proposals will be released tomorrow [Feb. 15]."

While the FCC proposal to end LightSquared's operation is in the form of a proposal, the reality is that this effectively kills the LightSquared application for its 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) data system.

LightSquared, as one may suspect, disagrees with the FCC's actions. According to LightSquared spokesman Chris Stern, the company plans to fight on and prove that its proposed system and GPS can co-exist.

However, it's hard to see how LightSquared's protestations are anything but empty promises from a company about to fail.

The current failure of LightSquared to gain regulatory approval for its operations has cost its primary owner, Harbinger Capital Partners, more than half its value, and has forced the company to borrow operating funds at interest rates-more than 15 percent-closer to those charged by payday lenders than even junk bonds. A number of financial observers have suggested that LightSquared only has a few months left before it runs out of cash.

This means that the FCC's actions will almost certainly kill LightSquared long before it has a chance to find a reasonable solution to GPS interference, assuming one exists.

Read this story online here: http://bit.ly/wTxFm4

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more