Battle with cell phones for bandwidth worries GPS industry

Imagine the frustration in Yuma, Ariz., last year when garage door remote controls just plain stopped working.

The receivers on the openers were overwhelmed when a nearby Marine Corps air station moved its radio traffic to a new spectrum — a wavelength close to the one used by civilians to heft open those doors.

Luckily, a $2 jury rig to most openers fixed the problem. But in a conflict between military necessity and consumer convenience, there was never much doubt which side would have to tinker with its gear.

Now a radio war is brewing between two large commercial interests. It’s far less clear which side might budge.

One side is on the continuing quest to increase wireless broadband for your cell phone, laptop or tablet.

It’s come up with a new technology combination that adds a satellite — in contrast to using cell phone towers only — to give you almost unlimited wireless coverage. And it brings fresh competition to curb high-speed broadband prices.

But that new technology has come smack up against satellite-guided navigation for your GPS device. The catch is that when the new signals move in, they’ll crowd out GPS traffic.

The GPS industry fears its devices could suffer the fate of those Arizona garage door openers — but without the simple fix.

So what might be a boon to cell carriers like Overland Park-based Sprint Nextel could mean trouble for GPS companies like Olathe’s Garmin Ltd.

“It’s not just soccer moms trying to find their way to the game,” said a Garmin spokesman. “It’s emergency response people, the military, all sorts of things.”

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Today’s mobile phones connect us over radio signals from cell towers that dot our landscape. They give you driving directions by separate transmissions from GPS satellites.

The budding new techno-combo would also use cell towers. But when those spots fall out of range, the handsets would look skyward to a satellite — not for GPS signals but to carry our voice conversations, text messages and such.

The handsets would run on a radio channel that cell phones haven’t used before. It rests right next to, and poses the danger of bleeding into, the wavelengths we use for GPS directions.

And that’s where the conflict lies.

On one side is LightSquared Inc., an ambitious venture hoping to toggle between ground-based cell towers and satellite signals. It aims to wholesale the either/or service to cell phone companies and electronics makers. It’s a job the company says can be done without fouling GPS.

The young company would give users high-speed connections when in range of its earthbound towers. And when out of range of those towers, its users could turn to the heavens for a slower connection.

Sprint is reportedly in talks with LightSquared to share towers and other network costs. Both companies declined to comment about that, although LightSquared said it does expect more partnerships in building its network.

LightSquared’s ground-based towers would use a technology called Long Term Evolution, or LTE. That so-called 4G or fourth-generation cell technology is already used by wireless industry leaders AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Sprint is contemplating use of the technology alongside, or to replace, its 4G WiMax network.

Meantime, in a spectrum uncomfortably next to the one LightSquared hopes to fill, sits an anxious GPS industry.

Garmin is the largest player, with half the portable consumer gadgets in the market and 90 percent of the GPS hardware in small-plane cockpits.

The GPS maker sounded warnings in a January report. Garmin said its lab tests mimicking a LightSquared network easily jammed both aviation and handheld GPS devices. That poses a threat, the company contends, to its business and to public safety.

LightSquared counters that the two technologies can co-exist. It has tentative approval from the Federal Communications Commission to charge ahead.

“The facts are the facts when you test for interference,” said Jeff Carlisle, a LightSquared vice president. “It’s possible there will be disagreements as we move forward … We’re looking for what’s the most efficient and fairest way to work it out.”

At the crux of the clash is a radio spectrum ever more crammed by signals zipping to and from mobile gadgets.

“This is just a symptom of a broader problem,” said Dale Hatfield, a former chief engineer and technologist for the FCC. “When you run out of elbow room, people start jostling each other.”

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The story begins in what engineers and regulators refer to as L-Band 1. The frequency range ends at 1559 megahertz — right where the GPS band starts. That L-band long ago was set aside for satellite communications.

Yet for years, the L-band was like a mostly empty subdivision on the border of crowded neighborhood. Companies have chased grand plans before in pursuit of a profit from the derelict property — with almost no success.

Now comes Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone backing LightSquared.Unlike the failures that have tried satellite phone service, Falcone’s LightSquared is betting the marriage of a satellite with a network of conventional cell towers will prosper.

The company hopes to roll out wholesale service in Baltimore, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver this year. But in some ways, devices tuned to its network would have nationwide coverage almost immediately. Any LightSquared-friendly phone with a clear view to the southern sky will have a connection.

The FCC will ultimately referee the dispute between LightSquared and the GPS industry. The agency has reacted eagerly to the company’s plans, which would fit the Obama administration’s push for broadband wireless connections across the country.

It has granted a tentative license for LightSquared. The company would sell service to cell phone carriers like Sprint, to device manufacturers and to retail stores.

Still, the FCC has held back on a full go-ahead. An agency spokesman said LightSquared will only have full permission to use the L-band when worries about GPS jamming are satisfied.

The agency ordered a working group drawn from LightSquared and the GPS industry to hash out the question. The group has already filed one report to the FCC on the technical issues and testing methodology to figure out if GPS really is in danger.

LightSquared’s hope is that the Garmin study will be refuted. The GPS company tried to imitate real-world conditions by separating low-power devices a matter of feet apart, when LightSquared cell towers would be miles apart and typically, not always, miles from a GPS unit.

By putting in the right frequency filters on its equipment, LightSquared expects to avoid the interference that Garmin found in its Olathe lab. Garmin said it tried to buy a filter from LightSquared for testing, without luck.

Still, both sides talk about the possibility of figuring out a scientific way to be good neighbors on the radio spectrum.

Trimble Navigation Ltd., a California firm, is among those in an industry reliant on undisturbed GPS signals. Company vice president Peter Large said, “LightSquared’s proposed service could prove to be fundamentally incompatible with existing GPS uses.”

But he said the company “is confident that technical analyses … will lead to a clear regulatory decision that will protect GPS.”

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Some analysts think the jamming problem might be the side effect of the fact that GPS manufacturers for years could work in frequencies next to the mostly empty L-band. They might have saved costs by putting less precision into their receivers, especially when there was almost no traffic in the next-door spectrum.

“It costs more money to squeeze more people into the same space” of radio frequency, said Hatfield, the former FCC technologist who now teaches at the University of Colorado.

But Ted Gartner, a spokesman for Garmin, said it would be “spurious” to put any blame on GPS device makers. (In fact, Hatfield said, “there may be innocent parties on both sides here.”)

Gartner said reworking millions of circuit boards for new GPS devices could devastate the industry, shoot costs skyward and still not solve the problem of devices already in use. If there’s any adjustment to be made, he said, it will have to be done by LightSquared.

“We are in a signal spectrum,” he said. “We always have been and we will continue to be.”

To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.

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