[time-nuts] latest on the lightsquared 'saga'

[Charles P. Steinmetz]

Robert wrote:

>What gets me (I'm an outsider in the UK), is that they seem to have 
>used the excuse of Urban Canyon lack of space based broadband to 
>hi-jack the frequencies for ground use. What's the betting 99% of 
>the traffic is ground based, not space? Even though the Urban 
>Canyonites could of course use fibre-optic broadband.

The FCC believes (and studies show) that mobile broadband is the Next 
Big Thing (some studies predict that the US will need 35x more mobile 
broadband spectrum before long).  So, most of the FCC's focus is on 
serving mobile users, who cannot be served by fiber optics.  To that 
end, the FCC is trying to add 500 MHz of spectrum that is useful for 
mobile broadband over the next 10 years, 300 MHz of it within 5 
years:  (http://www.broadband.gov/plan/).

Now, 500 MHz is nowhere near 35x what is now available, so even if 
the FCC is fully successful it presumably will not meet the demand -- 
but nobody at the FCC or in Congress seems to have noticed 
this.  Further, there is a limited amount of spectrum that is truly 
useful for mobile broadband -- high enough that antennas for handheld 
devices are manageable, but low enough to penetrate into buildings 
and other dark zones -- so 500 MHz will be very, very hard to 
find.  The plan appears to include "repacking" all over-the-air 
television stations into the VHF TV spectrum, to free up the UHF TV 
spectrum (ironically, immediately after converting the industry to a 
DTV modulation scheme that has severe multipath problems at VHF, so 
stations voluntarily packed themselves into the UHF spectrum during 
the transition).

MSS spectrum in the L-band (and elsewhere) has historically not been 
heavily utilized because of the cost of infrastructure and the 
less-than-stellar performance.  The first step toward making this 
spectrum more useful was to allow MSS licensees to construct an 
"ancillary terrestrial component" -- cellular base stations on towers 
-- to fill in holes.  The second step (Lightsquared and other MSS 
licensees who will follow) is to waive some of the provisions that 
make the terrestrial component "ancillary" (i.e., to allow much more 
widespread terrestrial use).  The third step is to authorize purely 
terrestrial services to operate in the MSS bands (the FCC has already 
officially proposed adding such allotments, and everyone in the 
communications industry expects it to adopt the 
proposal): 
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-126A1_Rcd.pdf

Bob asked where the 40k terrestrial base stations will go.  That 
number is on par with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, so one might 
expect the coverage to be similar (Sprint has about 46k sites for its 
1.9 GHz network).

Best regards,

Charles