LightSquared plans to quadruple power of its network

In a sharply worded letter to top officials at the Defense and Commerce departments complaining about a leak of draft test results to Bloomberg News, wireless carrier LightSquared failed to include a key page from the company's Dec. 7 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The omitted page said the company plans to quadruple the power of its network by 2017, which already is 1 billion times stronger than Global Positioning System signals. The Bloomberg report, which cited the leaked test results, said LightSquared's network caused interference with 75 percent of GPS receivers tested, even without the planned power increase.

Jeff Carlisle, LightSquared's executive vice president for regulatory affairs and public policy, said the omission was inadvertent, resulted from sloppy scanning and would be corrected.

The Federal Communications Commission directed LightSquared and a GPS industry working group to conduct tests during January 2012 in partnership with federal agencies, including the Defense and Transportation departments, to determine if the company's network, which uses frequencies adjacent to the GPS band, would interfere with GPS receivers.

Tests conducted this spring showed that the LightSquared network could interfere with personal GPS receivers, cellphones equipped with GPS chips, and high-precision receivers used for farming and surveying. To reduce interference, LightSquared proposed using only the lower 10 MHz of bandwidth allocated to it by FCC, which required a new round of tests. Bloomberg reported that the leaked draft test report said, "LightSquared signals caused harmful interference to majority of GPS receivers tested."

LightSquared Chief Executive Officer Sanjiv Ahuja said in a Dec. 12 letter to Ashton B. Carter, deputy secretary of Defense, and John Porcari, deputy secretary of Commerce, and posted on the company's website, that the leak was based on "incomplete, selective and slanted analysis of the testing of general location/navigation devices." Ahuja said the company's "power on the ground" proposal submitted to FCC on Dec. 7 shows the "vast majority of general location/navigation receivers will experience no interference" from the company's network.

The letter included an attachment of the Dec. 7 filing with FCC, but omitted the page that disclosed in technical terms that the company planned to quadruple the power of its network in two stages by 2017.

That page, contained in the Dec. 7 filing, said, "LightSquared has nevertheless proposed to limit its power on the ground when transmitting in the lower 10 MHz from 1526-1536 MHz to no more than -30 dBm until January 1, 2015, -27dBm until January 1, 2017, and -24dBm thereafter in order to provide greater certainty to GPS users and manufacturers that GPS receivers designed to look into the L-band [the GPS and LightSquared frequency band] will not experience receiver overload."

The power increase LightSquared plans in both 2015 and 2017 represents roughly a doubling of power. Carlisle said this has been part of the company's plans for a long time. He added it "would be silly" for the company to try to hide facts that were part of the public record.

Bloomberg reported that 69 of 92, or 75 percent of receivers tested this fall, "experienced harmful interference" at a distance of 100 meters from a LightSquared base station. That does not dovetail with the test plan detailed by Dean Bunce, ground segment lead for the Federal Aviation Administration's GPS-based Wide Area Augmentation System who serves as the co-chairman of the National Positioning, Navigation and Timing Engineering Forum, which represents federal agencies involved in the GPS tests. In a presentation at Stanford University on Nov. 17, Bunce said the Air Force Space Command sponsored testing of 182 GPS receivers at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., from Oct. 26 through Nov. 4.

The tests, conducted in an anechoic chamber insulated from outside radio signals, included 101 general location receivers, 52 military and 29 high-precision GPS receivers and, Carlisle said, a LightSquared base station with a transmit power of 1,600 watts.

A federal source, who declined to be identified, said public release of the test results will not occur until next week or even later.

LightSquared, which has a $3 billion investment riding on the outcome of the tests, condemned the leak of the draft report in its letter and during an hourlong media call today. Ahuja, in his letter, said, "it is apparent this leak was intended to damage LightSquared's reputation, spread false information, and prejudice LightSquared before a full and complete analysis of the testing results" is presented to a multiagency PNT executive committee, FCC, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Ahuja asked that the PNT executive committee, chaired by Defense and Transportation, "immediately issue a public statement clarifying that the information leaked . . . was preliminary, incomplete and did not represent the full findings from the test results." He also called for an investigation into the leak.