The Ghost of LightSquared Appears To Be Determined To Haunt/Harm Aviation

As previously noted, a revamp of the highly criticized LightSquared program has appeared under a new name -- Ligado. Worse; despite ample evidence of its dangers (especially to aviation interests), the FCC has greenlit this project after heretofore having kept it at bay... and many on the aerospace community are none too happy about it.

Ligado Networks has plans to deploy a low-power terrestrial network in the L-Band, but the technology has a number of documented issues with interference with GPS utilization... and the DoD, in particular, is ready to go to war to stop it. Dana Deasy, the Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer, recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and pretty direct about the Pentagon's opposition.

Deasy stated that the Pentagon, "...made it clear that approving Ligado’s plans would cause harmful interference to millions of GPS receivers across the country, both civilian and military. DoD senior leadership engagement on this matter has been long-standing and consistent, as part of a coordinated interagency approach for assessing the impact to reception of the GPS L1 signal. The National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee (EXCOM), representing nine Federal agencies who use GPS, began raising concerns to National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) about earlier versions of Ligado’s proposal and the harmful interference impacts for GPS in 2012. The PNT EXCOM’s nine Federal agency members, including DoD and the Department of Transportation (DoT), also signed a joint letter in December 2018 to NTIA, unanimously and unambiguously objecting to the latest Ligado license modification request.

Starting in 2012 and spanning across several administrations, multiple Secretaries of Defense have raised GPS interference concerns about the plans of Ligado and its predecessor companies. In letters in April and June 2019, the then Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan sent letters to request that the FCC not allow the deployment of the proposed Ligado system. The current Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper also sent a letter to the FCC Chairman on November 18, 2019, requesting that the Commission not allow the terrestrial wireless system proposed by Ligado to move forward."

He added that, "As recently as March 24, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist reiterated the Department’s strong opposition in a letter to the Department of Commerce."

In the final parts of this statement, he noted that, "The FCC’s Ligado decision is flawed and must be reversed. As the Committees has so clearly expressed, this is a bad deal for America."

FMI: https://www.defense.gov/