The following statement was released by Jim Kirkland, Vice President and General Counsel of Trimble, a founding member of the Coalition to Save Our GPS, in response to prepared testimony by LightSquared Executive Vice President Jeff Carlisle for a hearing yesterday of the House Small Business Committee:
“LightSquared’s continued attempts to deny responsibility for the interference caused by its proposed new terrestrial use of satellite spectrum are unfounded and self-serving. LightSquared is now trying to cover for the fact that its proposed operations will interfere with hundreds of thousands of high-precision receivers used by critical government users, farmers, and small businesses, and that its proposed technical fixes will not work for these receivers. These statements also attempt to cover for the fact that it doesn’t have the money to pay the real costs of implementing its plans, so it needs to shift these costs to GPS manufacturers.
“The FCC has made clear that LightSquared will not be permitted to commence operations until it has demonstrated that all interference issues have been resolved, and did not make an exception for high-precision receivers. In fact, the reason high-precision receivers suffer interference that LightSquared can’t solve is that they were designed to take advantage of commercial satellite services LightSquared, its predecessors, and Inmarsat have offered that are used to improve the precision of these receivers. LightSquared’s claim that GPS manufacturers were on notice of its proposed terrestrial use of satellite spectrum is also false, since it was only authorized to provide limited fill-in services prior to 2011. For LightSquared to claim that its interference to high-precision receivers is somehow the fault of GPS manufacturers, warranting a ‘recall,’ has no basis in fact, law or prior FCC decisions. To the contrary, the FCC has consistently held that transition costs must be borne by the party proposing a new use, not prior spectrum users who acted in good faith reliance on prior decisions, as the GPS industry did here.”