back to article Sprint springs into bed with LightSquared

Sprint is to help LightSquared get its 4G network rolled out across America, and become a significant customer of that network too, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Those letters were sent out to LightSquared's shareholders, assuring them that Sprint was not only going to be a "significant customer" of LightSquared's …

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  1. Anon
    Mushroom

    Where are we?

    Of course I hope it doesn't, but it will be *hilarious* if it does wipe out GPS.

  2. Gary 7
    FAIL

    GPS does not like LightSquared

    It's not just "skepticism" that LightSquared interferes with GPS, it has in fact been proven to be the case. But who needs GPS, anyway? I mean, it's only used by the military...and sat nav units...and surveying equipment...and farm equipment. Oh, and that little thing called "NextGen Air Traffic Control", which will be using GPS to all but completely replace radar as the primary means of keeping aircraft away from each other.

    Maybe the FCC should have thought their little plan through to give away spectrum frequencies so close to a critical infrastructure...

  3. Martin Gregorie

    GPS interference

    The first set of tests in Arizona reportedly caused significance interference with many consumer-grade GPS receivers. A lot of the problem is due to the FCC not mandating a guard band between the top of the LightSquared frequencies and the GPS band, though LightSquared is saying that the problems are down to over-sensitive or insufficiently selective GPS receivers and that their transmitter has no bandspread, but then they would say that, wouldn't they?

    The problem is apparently severe enough to put a nearby gliding competition at risk. These are judged by examining the GPS logs of the competing gliders. GPS interference makes the logs inaccurate or containing no valid data in the worst case: this would force the event to be canceled if the logs were bad enough to prevent scores to be calculated.

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