Corruption Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill
April 9, 2012 in Cell Phone
Last year, a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T …
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Corruption Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill
The issue here is not lightsquare’s business model, but rather the frequency spectrum they planned to use. The FCC got involved for good reason. The spectrum that Lightsquared wanted to use is directly adjacent to the frequencies used by GPS satellites for world wide navigation. Unfortunately, GPS uses an extremely low power, and tests were showing that the extremely high powered ground-based systems proposed by lightquared would have adversely interfered with GPS navigation, which includes the next generation of aircraft navigation and approach control, among other systems. Imagine if they hadn’t been stopped, your “cheap cell phone” could have caused planes to come crashing out of the sky! (okay, that’s perhaps being a little melodramatic, but it could certainly cause navigation failures that could result in bad things happening).
So don’t blame this on Verizon and AT&T. I would encourage lightsquared to find some alternative frequency spectrum and continue their approach.