LTE KILLING GPS?

LTE is coming and devices packed with LTE radios will need to be approved in droves. There has been (and will be) a significant push to get LTE into as many hands and homes as possible for many reasons. The increase in speed, the decrease in lag, and the boost in bandwidth across the US would bring many of the goals of the FCC’s push for a faster internet closer to reality. In order to get these devices into hands faster, would the FCC ignore the possibility that LTE is not “fully baked”?

On January 19th, members of the GPS industry were granted an audience with the FCC to discuss findings that a portion of the LTE broadcast spectrum may be too close to the spectrum used for GPS, and causing significant problems with the technologies cooperating together.

There is evidence that these LTE points being deployed by LightSquared are, in fact, causing interference on a significant scale.

LightSquared has officially commented that it plans to cooperate with the GPS companies and make sure that their technologies do not interfere with each other, but at the moment tension seems high, and the continued inaction on behalf of the FCC is worrisome. Be it negligence, ignorance, or malicious intent, the blatant disregard for the evidence that LightSquared’s broadcasting equipment would interfere with existing GPS infrastructure is a bad sign.

The desire to fast track these technologies “at any cost” is bound to have repercussions. At this point, however, it seems only time will tell if LightSquared holds true to their word, or if we are beginning to see the end of GPS as we know it.