Opinion: GPS Is Endangered By a Misguided FCC Decision Made During the Trump Administration
President Biden has proposed spending $2 trillion on infrastructure, including roads and bridges, climate change research, renewable energy, and electric vehicles and charging stations, writes Diana Furchtgott-Roth at The Washington Post. All require reliable availability of the Global Positioning System, a constellation of 24 satellites whose signals enable drivers to find their way and emergency workers to get to accidents. Navigation systems in millions of cars depend on GPS.
But now the entire GPS system is endangered by a misguided decision the Federal Communications Commission made during the Trump administration. GPS is vulnerable to interference from ground-based transmissions, yet last April the FCC unanimously granted an application by Ligado Networks, based in Reston, VA, to offer a ground-based 5G service in spectrum, much of which is next to spectrum allocated for GPS.
Why is that likely to be a serious problem? Because Ligado’s signals will be 2 billion times as powerful as GPS signals. Just as an outdoor rock concert would drown out birdsong, the proposed Ligado 5G transmitters would overwhelm GPS signals. Ligado is authorized to begin work, but as a relatively small company unlikely to be able to tackle a nationwide deployment, it is expected to sell the spectrum to a giant wireless carrier, such as AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon.
Continue reading at The Washington Post.
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