Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics

The seeds of LightSquared's failure to win government clearance to build a 4G-LTE network can, ironically, be found in the "approval" the company received just 13 months ago.

In January 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was clearly getting a positive vibe from LightSquared's plan to build an open-access network using both satellites and cell towers. The conditional approval issued by the agency stressed the positives of LightSquared's plan, noting that "if LightSquared successfully deploys its integrated satellite/terrestrial 4G network, it will be able to provide mobile broadband communications in areas where it is difficult or impossible to provide coverage by terrestrial base stations (such as in remote or rural areas and non-coastal maritime regions), as well as at times when coverage may be unavailable from terrestrial-based networks (such as during natural disasters)."

Despite the FCC's glowing remarks about LightSquared, the conditional approval made it clear the plan would never gain final clearance unless it could be implemented without interfering with GPS devices. In a nutshell, LightSquared needed a special waiver because it is trying to use spectrum allocated for low-power space-to-ground transmissions for something it was not originally allocated for: high-power ground-only transmissions that could fuel a nationwide wireless mobile broadband network. The portion of L-Band spectrum controlled by LightSquared is adjacent to the spectrum used by GPS devices, and GPS devices, according to repeated tests, would be unable to receive the signals intended for them because the high-power LightSquared signals would overpower the GPS ones.