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

[Bob Camp]

Hi

Indeed this is my fear. The authorization really has very little to do with filling in dark holes in the sat coverage and everything to do with setting up a full blown terrestrial system. This is not going to be a "far away and easily ignored" thing. If you have cell phone coverage, you will likely have this stuff as well. The level may or may not be enough to take your timing gear off the air. It will take it down for a number of us.

Bob

On Mar 3, 2011, at 5:38 PM, Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> and follow the instructions there.