Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Everything Else => Topic started by: Gray_Area on December 21, 2011, 12:22:41 am
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What the hell does this mean?
On December 8, 2011, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom announced a wholesale agreement deal between his company FreedomPop and LightSquared. The FreedomPoP venture will launch in 2012 with the ultimate objective of ensuring that every American has access to fast, free and convenient communication services.
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If it involves Lightsquared, not much. They've got an uphill battle on their hands.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246742/lightsquared_asks_fcc_to_affirm_its_spectrum_rights.html (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246742/lightsquared_asks_fcc_to_affirm_its_spectrum_rights.html)
If I understand correctly, they sold their project to the FCC as space to earth comms adjacent to the GPS frequencies. Then, realizing that wouldn't work, backpedaled and tried to argue that they could use the same frequencies for terrestrial comms.
However, putting kilowatt transmitters on towers adjacent to the GPS L1 band would swamp the receivers on civilian and military GPS receivers. The military can use the L2 channels, which are a bit more out of harms way, but basically, due to the GPS mfrs. not needing to use expensive filtering on the frontends of their receivers (nothing to really filter out -- they were in a protected chunk of spectrum) your car gps, every phone with gps, hiking gps, etc, would work like shite.
Planes off course, old ladies driving into walls, etc...
But, Lightsquared says (I'm using creative license here...) "It's OK. They can all just buy new GPS receivers with better filtering. All 500 million of them."
I expect massive legal battles with lots of pissing into the wind. There's even questions as to why the FCC ok'd their project to begin with.
Paging MonMotha... ;D