[ NNSquad ] Re: New U.S. wireless network a hazard for GPS (Lauren Weinstein)

["David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>]

During the deep and thoughtful discussions that were carried out in the 
Spectrum Policy Task Force at the FCC, and in the FCC Technological 
Advisory Committee when I was a part of it, many of us engineers 
recognized that the current structure of FCC regulations that regulate 
only transmission are the source of many problems.

The problem between LightSquared's licensed band and the GPS receivers 
is one example.   The FCC doesn't regulate that receivers should not be 
designed so that they fail due to transmissions in other bands.  This is 
because the FCC does not currently regulate receivers at all, unlike the 
UK radio spectrum regulators.

The problem, if there is one, is that perfectly legal transmissions that 
are in the LightSquared band (and which would have been legal to other 
users of that band) are potentially going to make low-quality GPS 
receivers malfunction.

Now one of the complainers is Trimble.  Trimble does not make GPS 
transmitters that I know of.  They just make products that gain value 
from the GPS transmitters in the sky.   Unfortunately, the "quality of 
experience" of Trimble's users will degrade, to the extent that their 
receivers are poorly designed in terms of dealing with radios operating 
in adjacent channels.  Why were they poorly designed for this?  One 
might well ask.  Who is responsible to the customers?  Well, ultimately 
Trimble.

However Trimble and others have a practical problem - their product is 
hard to recall.

So instead, they want LightSquared to pay for their design weakness.   I 
wonder if that is "right"?  Rather than recall the products, they could 
seek a different remedy - they could pay the FCC for the unusability of 
adjacent channel services.   Surely Trimble has the money from its 
product liability insurers to make such a payment.

Money need not be spent on the "impractical" recall, but can be spent 
where the cost of the fix is more practical - paying the US Government 
(and the taxpayers who will not get the benefit of the services in the 
adjacent channel due to Trimble's mistakes) what their mistake has cost 
the public.

This of course would match the value of "auctioning" the spectrum that 
would otherwise accrue to the Federal Budget.  Probably a few 10's of 
Billions of US $ would cover the loss caused by careless design.

   [ This seems like an approach certainly worthy of consideration --
     though I would expect technically-oriented legal battles over
     liability in such cases to be fierce.  But from my standpoint, it
     is most important that consumer GPS units in the field not be
     rendered unusable by LightSquared transmissions.  Even if
     manufacturers agreed to try replace every unit in the field for
     free, many consumers would never be located and more would
     routinely ignore all such contacts.  Since failure of GPS when
     you expect it to work can have very serious consequences,
     protection of consumers should be the main priority.

            -- Lauren Weinstein
               NNSquad Moderator ]