Lightsquared and GPS system

Jim Logajan said:
More news:

LightSquared CEO resigns:

http://www.4-traders.com/AT-T-INC-1...esigns-As-CEO-In-Management-Shakeup-14048278/

It also says that "Martin Harriman, the executive vice president of ecosystem development and satellite business also left the company...." I have to wonder - what satellite business? Did they really plan to launch any?
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Hmmm, I thought that perhaps satellite business referred to non-core or ancillary business. But your reading probably makes more sense.

And who didn't see this (or something like it) coming?:
In the meantime, it is considering a plan to swap its wireless airwaves, or spectrum, with some held by the Defense Department as a last-ditch effort to resolve the GPS interference concerns.
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olasek said:
They have one already in orbit, a pretty large one too.
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I had no idea :redface: - I assumed the only reason they wanted to go and spend yet more billions on a ground based system was because their satellite plan wasn't going to work out or cost too much.

It seems their satellite is in indeed one of the largest ever launched, with the largest commercial reflector antenna:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightSquared

Seems the terrestrial sites were only originally intended to handle areas in radio "shadows," but I guess they decided to push for more and that backfired.
 
Jim Logajan said:
I had no idea :redface: - I assumed the only reason they wanted to go and spend yet more billions on a ground based system was because their satellite plan wasn't going to work out or cost too much.

It seems their satellite is in indeed one of the largest ever launched, with the largest commercial reflector antenna:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightSquared

Seems the terrestrial sites were only originally intended to handle areas in radio "shadows," but I guess they decided to push for more and that backfired.
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It's not technically feasible to support high bandwidth data for a large number of terminals from a single satellite or even an orbit full of them. The original plan to do so was a non-starter and the switch to a large number of terrestrial stations was inevitable if the goal was "bringing high speed internet to the masses".
 
gprellwitz said:
"In the meantime, it is considering a plan to swap its wireless airwaves, or spectrum, with some held by the Defense Department as a last-ditch effort to resolve the GPS interference concerns."
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gismo said:
It's not technically feasible to support high bandwidth data for a large number of terminals from a single satellite or even an orbit full of them. The original plan to do so was a non-starter and the switch to a large number of terrestrial stations was inevitable if the goal was "bringing high speed internet to the masses".
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That top quote was their plan all along. Stirring up trouble with GPS is almost an identical tactical duplicate of Nextel stirring up trouble in 800 MHz years ago... Nextel got away with it, got Public Safety to move to one end of the band while they moved to the other, and they never owned any "cellular" spectrum at all during that time-frame. Cost all of us billions, and most people have no clue it even happened.

As far as that latter quote... they switched from wanting to be a satellite provider to needing a lot more bandwidth in a lot more places than their birds could provide, around the time the Feds started collecting that huge pile of cash to bring IP to rural areas... it's on all over our cell phone bills. Companies have been trying to figure out how to crack open that ever-growing piggy bank for a while now. Lightsquared wasn't the first to try to find a way to tap that money, and won't be the last...
 
LS was in trouble when Falcone bought in...
LS was in trouble because it was not possible physically/financially to put enough sats in LEO to provide the broadband internet service they envisioned...
Falcone understood that...
You have to understand the Falcones of this world... He is a street hustler... They always find a way to bend the rules or just plain cheat... Take a Falcone and take away all his money, everything, until all he has is the shirt on his back... Will he take an honest job sweeping floors so he can eat that night? No way! He will be out on a street corner with three walnut shells and a pea, separating the suckers from their money because he is what he is...
So he bought in understanding LS would not work without land base high power transmitters but he believed he could pull the rabbit out of the hat because he is "Falcone"... Like any good hustler he reverses the rules.. It is the GPS receiver's fault for not being able to withstand his high power signals... And he has been busy donating campaign cash, bribing low level officials, and running a big lie campaign in the national media to ingrain the idea into the public consciousness that if only those nasty GPS makers would have put a 5 cent filter in it the public could have no roaming charge phones and unlimited internet for "Cheap"... (Watch the shells, see how deftly he weaves them in and out)

Where Phil miscalculated is that there are a hundred million GPS receivers in the country - phones, Ipads, laptops, cars, UPS trucks, Fedex, military, police, harbor ships, yachts, airplanes from Cub to A380, and on and on.... The FCC is not a bunch of boobs... When they structured the GPS service knowing that the receivers are receiving microscopically weak signals they made sure that the adjacent channels were not licensed for high power land transmitters... Falcone is desperately trying to big lie his way into having the high power transmitters on every tall tower in the country...

What he is trying to do is the equivalent of him hiring 16 year old girls with a learners driving permit and having them drive 80,000 pound liquid propane semitrucks through the city during rush hour and blaming the pedestrians they run over for not getting out of the way in time...

denny-o
 
The issue that LS never had to deal with was the latency issues inherent with satellite coms. I was curious to see how everybody would deal with that.
 
Henning said:
The issue that LS never had to deal with was the latency issues inherent with satellite coms. I was curious to see how everybody would deal with that.
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It was just data wasn't it? Aside from things like typing in a terminal window, talking or playing games that run on the internet, latency isn't much of an issue with large blocks of non-realtime data. If it's just small amounts of data where throughput isn't an issue but latency is, you just go terrestrial with that.
 
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Henning said:
The issue that LS never had to deal with was the latency issues inherent with satellite coms. I was curious to see how everybody would deal with that.
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WildBlue did it. But you can't truly get around physics. They just have tweaked buffers and various IP layer timeouts.
 
I always have hell issues trying to keep guests VPN links up over VSat. Anything outside a perfect signal and connection was not good.

It was supposed to be data only? With VoIP that doesn't seem like a reality, and there are definite latency issues VoIPing. My experience with satcoms data is that you get 10% of advertised speed 90% of the time.
 
Henning said:
I always have hell issues trying to keep guests VPN links up over VSat. Anything outside a perfect signal and connection was not good.

It was supposed to be data only? With VoIP that doesn't seem like a reality, and there are definite latency issues VoIPing. My experience with satcoms data is that you get 10% of advertised speed 90% of the time.
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We've had VoIP phones up and running talking to Asterisk over a WildBlue connection, but shhh... don't tell them, it's apparently against their Terms of Service. :)

Cisco phones don't have enough buffering. Polycom phones work great. The cheap Chinese phones (well, Ciscos and Polycoms are also made in China, but you know what I mean... the Grandstream phones and stuff like that...) are hit and miss.

Definitely a factor of how well the CODEC and the buffering quality is, in the phone set itself if doing that style VoIP. Skype... I wouldn't try video... it'll just give up and go to still frames or drop the video altogether, but the audio seems fine.

Definitely delayed, thanks to the joys of light speed to geosynch and back. :)

As far as VPN over VSat goes... the VPN timeout timers and probably packet sizes and retry counts probably needed to be tweaked. DoD does VPN over VSat every day of the week, 24/7. :)
 
Don't think there was ever any intent to deliver this service. I think the idea was to string this thing out long enough until the spectrum allocation becomes valuable enough to resell. It's been done before. That and a little regulatory shenanigans a la nextel to get some additional consideration.
 
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