Sprint Drops Struggling LightSquared

The saga of Light Squared continues: Sprint recently pulled out of a deal to buy wireless bandwidth from Light Squared due to LS's inability to obtain FCC approval. Some speculate that LS's only move now is bankruptcy, despite a $65 million cash infusion from Sprint for pulling out of the contract. Light Squared insists that the FCC should allocate less 'controversial' block of  frequencies for LS's network to utilize. LS also complains that the GPS lobby waited for years while LS was developing its technology before raising complaints about interference. 

We have watched with baited breath as the wireless broadband startup has fought to convince the FCC that it's 4G technology is safe and compatible with existing GPS technology. The FCC, along with manufacturers and users of GPS equipment, claim that interference will occur when Light Squared launches its LTE network on frequencies which neighbor those used by GPS. Light Squared has argued that the blame lies with the tendency of GPS to be sloppy and to 'leak' outside of its allocated bandwidth, and as such the burden for causing interference is on the shoulders of the legacy GPS system and not with Light Squared.


Sprint Drops Struggling LightSquared by Thomas Vieira is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.