US wholesale player LightSquared has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to resolve regulatory issues that have prevented it from launching its satellite service.
LightSquared, the embattled LTE 4G US player, has hired well-known solicitor Theodore Olsen in a final bid to save its seemingly doomed terrestrial LTE network project. Olsen’s main claim to fame was helping George W. Bush claim a victory in the 2000 US election in the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has said that it plans to indefinitely suspend a conditional waiver that would permit LightSquared to build a ground-based LTE network using satellite spectrum. The decision was made following a recommendation from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which said that it performed a “substantial amount of testing and analysis” regarding LightSquare’s plans and the impact they would have on GPS services.
LightSquared, the aspiring US LTE carrier, has received a hammer blow to its hopes of shaking up the US market with a wholesale LTE network from a damning report released last week by the executive committee for Space-based Positioning Navigation & Timing (PNT).
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has said that AT&T must face an extra review next year, putting a significant hurdle in the way of its planned merger with T-Mobile USA.
Contrary to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) warning of a “looming spectrum crisis”, there is no shortage of radio spectrum in the USA, according to an analyst note from Citi Investment Research & Analysis. However, too much of the spectrum is in the wrong hands, it warned.
Philip Falcone, manager of hedge fund Harbinger Investments, which funds US wholesale LTE/satellite player LightSquared, has hit back at the US interest group the Coalition to Save our GPS, claiming that interference problems are the fault of incumbent GPS users, and not of LightSquared. In an interview with US broadcaster CNBC, Falcone said that existing GPS users did not apply the “proper filtering” to their devices and that “we’re not interfering with them; they’re interfering with us.”
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Whichever way you cut it, it’s not been a good week for US LTE-satellite mash-up LightSquared. The firm has been under pressure over the likelihood that the satellite element of its game will interfere with GPS systems. Early in the week LightSquared announced its intention to switch spectrum bands so that its operations would be “further away from the GPS frequencies, greatly reducing the risk for interference.”
LightSquared has announced a plan to switch spectrum bands in an effort to head-off concerns that its frequencies interfere with GPS systems. The announcement comes just two days after the wholesaler secured a last-minute extension to a deadline requiring it to submit a report on interference to the US Federal Communications Commission.
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US-based LTE wholesale carrier LightSquared has been granted a two week extension on its deadline to file a report on whether it is able to build out its network without interfering with GPS signals.
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