Thursday, October 6, 2011

LightSquared and GPS still in the news

Sanjiv Ahuja talked to C-SPAN on September 29, 2011 about LightSquared's work to build a $14 billion high-speed wireless network across the US, interfering with precision GPS use. It will be satellite based and will improve networking capacity across the USA, yet the network will interfere with some of the spectrum used by global positioning system (GPS) equipment.

LightSquared obtained the spectrum from their predecessor companies purchases, who purchased the spectrum decades ago. American Mobile Satellite Corporation, Mobile Satellite Ventures, and Skyterra preceded LightSquared.

I believe you can skip the first 5:29 to hear Sanjiv talk about the GPS conflict. Mr Ahuja has been well coached in presenting his case and staying on message. (I do not use the term 'coached' in a negative way. I believe all CEOs of large companies should be coached.)

Sanjiv is selling how LightSquared will help people, how LightSquared is the underdog, how LightSquared will bring new jobs, how LightSquared will save people money, how LightSquared will help the students. He even discusses how LightSquared will help the video gaming industry. Sounds like a political campaign strategy, get as many people to connect with your piont of view as possible. :)

Cecilia Kang (Washington Post, Technology Policy Reporter) starts QA at 13:30. She does a pretty good job. She asks him to discuss claims of competitors linking up with political powers to stop LightSquared starting at 47:00.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/301812-1/
http://www.saveourgps.org/
Additional Field Guide Post:
http://field-guide.blogspot.com/2011/04/potential-gps-signal-reception-problems.html

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