Failure of massive wireless experiment could keep rural Nevada off the grid

By Karoun Demirjian

Sunday, March 11, 2012 | 3 a.m.

Last spring, LightSquared traveled to the desert near Las Vegas to test a high-speed wireless network that the communications company promised would blanket the country in connectivity within three years.

What they found — what many say federal regulators already knew — so stymied the company’s application to build that network that the failure could be a roadblock to similar wireless development, all but guaranteeing that large swathes of rural Nevada will remain off the grid.

The problem with the Southern Nevada tests last year is rooted in the spectrum: that finite range of radio waves that can carry information sent and received on high-speed wireless devices.

LightSquared’s network would have used existing satellites to communicate with a system of ground transmitters, all working on the same frequencies. The system could have reached into rural areas, like much of Nevada, linking them with major urban centers.

The plan rested on getting clearance from the Federal Communications Commission to take over the spectrum from 1525 MHz to 1559 MHz.

Unfortunately, 1559 MHz is where the range for global positioning systems — whether it’s the GPS navigator in your car or the one attached to a military plane — picks up, creating the potential for crippling interference.

Early tests, even before LightSquared came to try things out in Nevada, showed using the frequency was causing GPS systems to jam, in cars and planes, because there was no buffer between the spectrum GPS was using and the spectrum LightSquared wanted to use.

Why were they operating at such proximity?

“The basic problem is we’re trying to squeeze more people onto the available spectrum,” said Dale Hatfield, former head of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology, who now teaches at the University of Colorado. “It’s like trying to squeeze more cars onto the highway, so something’s got to give.”

There’s a run on space over the airwaves that has would-be players like LightSquared trying to pack in tighter and tighter, creating a system that should work in theory but hasn’t in practice.

“Spectrum is the beachfront property that is very hard to come by. ... There isn’t that much space left,” said Michael Marcus, a 25-year veteran of the FCC who served as senior technical adviser to the Spectrum Policy Task Force and now runs an independent consulting firm on wireless technology.

But the boundaries of beachfront property are a lot more enforceable than bands on the spectrum. Consider Hatfield’s example: If the spectrum of usable wavelengths is the highway, then the painted lines between lanes are the barriers — but just like cars on highways, devices can veer out of their designated lanes.

“Interference is both a transmitter problem and a receiver problem. ... We can’t afford going forward to have receivers that are not capable of rejecting interference on either side better than they have in the past,” Hatfield said. “It’s just like putting more emissions controls in cars. To clean up the radio environment, we’ve got to do a better job with receivers.”

But try to tell that to an industry with millions of customers — including the military and members of Congress.

“Not only does GPS represent the very core of our business, it is a valuable national treasure,” John Foley, director of aviation GNSS technology for Garmin International, a popular maker of car navigators, told the House Transportation Committee at a hearing last month. “Fortunately for businesses, consumers and the nation, this year has, in essence, been a trial run. No system was actually launched or significant threat unleashed that wiped out or began to shut down GPS.”

But while the downfall of LightSquared may have been a reprieve for GPS, it’s a setback for rural Nevada.

“Unless the FCC removes some of the uncertainty, no one in their right mind will ever try this again,” said Marcus.

Although the spectrum of wavelengths is uniform, it isn’t used uniformly. In a thumping metropolis like Las Vegas, for example, there’s not much usable spectrum, especially compared to a place like Pahrump or Tonopah. But near the Nevada Test and Training Range, there will likely be a run on space again.

In recent months, Congress has fixated on variable uses for the spectrum as a potential revenue generator. “Spectrum auctions” — selling blocks of local bandwidth to the highest bidder — are paying for much of the unemployment insurance benefits out-of-work Nevadans will collect between now and the end of the year, and they’ve been proposed to pay for other things, as well.

But as LightSquared stumbles — some lawmakers have even taken to calling it “the FCC’s Solyndra” — some in Washington are advocating thinking small.

“There are different perspectives on innovation. One says innovation will come when you have large, demonstrable successes — the 3G networks, for example,” said Allan Friedman, who follows information technology policy as a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Another view says make as much spectrum available as possible and then allow standards groups and industry groups and just tinkerers to come in and start playing .... This is the story of Wi-Fi.”

“If anything, I think we err too strongly on the first model,” Friedman said. “Once you have a basic platform there’s no limit to what people will find in creative uses — I think that’s something that should be an American priority.”

Although industry experts agree that it’s hard to get the giants to innovate, they say the solution, especially for rural development, is in getting more large companies — if not LightSquared’s proposal, then something like it — up and running to create competition with today’s big players, AT&T and Verizon.

“Economists can argue, but a duopoly is usually just not enough to get the sort of vibrant competition you need,” Hatfield said. “It’s harder today to enter the business, because you have to not only build out your network, but you have to take customers away from existing networks. It’s difficult for new entrants.”

Whether or not Marcus is right that the death of LightSquared will ward off future FCC applicants from making another go at launching a shore-to-shore wireless network, LightSquared's downfall is a major setback to the goal of connecting people all over Nevada, and the nation.

“The (Obama) administration tried to commit to finding ... fresh spectrum for these new systems, that was one of Obama’s early commitments,” Hatfield said. “I think it’s going to be tough to do it.”