LightSquared Asks Government to Set Record Straight on Test Results, Punish Leaker
LightSquared complained bitterly Monday about what it called a distorted leak from government interference tests of the company’s planned wholesale wireless network. “This came from someone inside the government process, and it is an outrage,” Martin Harriman, the company’s executive vice president for ecosystem development and satellite business, told reporters. He was responding to a Bloomberg News report that LightSquared’s technology had failed tests with three-quarters of general navigation devices. Executives expressed confidence that the FCC will by March approve its operation. They said they will make fallback plans only in the event of an unexpected rejection.
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CEO Sanjiv Ahuja asked the Defense and Transportation departments to investigate the disclosure and punish those responsible. In a letter to an official at each department, he also asked that the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing that they chair, known as ExCom, “immediately issue a public statement clarifying that the information leaked … was preliminary, incomplete, and did not represent the full findings from the test results.” The company said on an afternoon media conference call that it hadn’t heard back from the government concerning the letter to deputy secretaries Ashton Carter at DOD and John Pocari at DOT. DOD didn’t respond right away to an inquiry from us. DOT declined to comment.
What the article misrepresented as test failure was a minor 1dB rise in a receiver’s noise floor, based on an assumption of 32 times higher antenna power than LightSquared proposes, Harriman said. Taking into account a “power on the ground” proposal by the company to minimize interference, 14 of 92 general navigation devices in the tests registered the 1 dB change, he said. “Overwhelmingly, the majority of general navigation devices continued to perform perfectly,” Harriman said.
The tide is turning in the embattled company’s favor, General Counsel Curtis Lu insisted. “The facts are on our side,” he said. Lu said an SEC notice last week to lead investor Harbinger Capital Partners and founder Philip Falcone that enforcement action may be taken against them has “no effect on us.” ExCom will meet Wednesday and get the test results, Harriman said. It will send its conclusions to NTIA, which will send them to the FCC, he said. The process will be repeated with a second testing round that will last most of January and maybe into February, Harriman said. “If we don’t get the green light” from the commission, “we'll think about what to do next,” he said.