Ligado's LTE Plans See Support, Criticism

The FCC should approve Ligado's LTE proposal once the agency wraps up receiving comments on the satellite company's proposed operational restrictions and license modifications aimed at tackling interference with GPS, Technology Policy Institute President Thomas Lenard said in a filing Thursday in docket 12-340. While more flexibly licensed spectrum for mobile broadband was a key part of the FCC's 2010 National Broadband Plan, "the most available spectrum -- indeed, the only significant block of spectrum that is already licensed but not deployed -- is the [mobile satellite service] spectrum licensed to Ligado," Lenard said. Approving the license modification, plus allocating 1675-1680 MHz for terrestrial mobile use on a shared basis with federal users, would free up 40 megahertz -- more than half the AWS 3 spectrum, which yielded $45 billion in auction revenue, Lenard said. He said that while the FCC and White House have been trying to move government spectrum into the commercial sector, "failure to approve the current proposed license modifications would effectively achieve the opposite result by transferring a large block of spectrum from the commercial sector back to the government." In a separate filing Thursday in the docket, GPS company NovAtel raised a number of technical questions with the Roberson & Associates study Ligado has pointed to as proof the modified LTE proposal wouldn't pose a GPS interference threat (see 1605110024). NovAtel said it was "particularly concerned" that Ligado had moved away from a 1 dB rise in carrier-to-noise ratio as the standard for tolerance interference, saying it disagreed with Roberson's finding that there isn't a meaningful correlation between a 1 dB change and GPS performance and that interference must not exceed that 1 dB limit. It also questioned the lack of testing of other GPS L-band receivers and of GPS signal acquisition in the presence of LTE signals, only maintenance. Ligado didn't comment Friday.