Last year, representatives of a wide variety of industries and companies joined together to form the Coalition to Save Our GPS. It's purpose was to resolve a serious threat to the reliability and viability of the Global Positioning System (GPS) - a national utility upon which millions of Americans rely every day.
To safeguard GPS, the Coalition sought a number of remedies from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which had granted a waiver to a company called LightSquared that allowed them to repurpose the satellite spectrum immediately neighboring that of the GPS.
LightSquared planned to transmit ground-based radio signals that would be one billion or more times more powerful as received on earth than GPS's low-powered satellite-based signals, potentially causing severe interference impacting millions of GPS receivers - including those used by the federal agencies, state and local governments, first responders, airlines, mariners, civil engineering, construction and surveying, agriculture, and everyday consumers in their cars and on handheld devices.
CSDS is pleased to report that the Coalition's efforts were rewarded when the FCC announced earlier this week that it will not approve LightSquared's proposal to build a national 4G-LTE network after testing showed that the network would interfere with most existing GPS devices.
