The history of lightsquared, the company involved, is horrendous. They bought spectrum with a SPECIFIC restriction on it to avoid GPS interference - then proceeded to get a proposal approved that violates that restriction. The amount of bad faith dealing by this company was eye opening.
I thought Garmin / Trimble and basically every GPS company had sued them because of how terrible their proposals and behavior has been.
This is not traditional 5G, it's basically misusing satellite spectrum.
For those not in all the details - the spectrum was for earth to space communication.
They bought it and said they would use it to do earth based broadcast.
First - if this spectrum was usable for earth broadcast LOTS more people would have bid on it and used it.
Second - almost all their proposals were totally and obviously disastrous for other existing users of the spectrum.
With enough venture funding and sticking around for 10 years until you find a compliant FCC you can be rewarded for your bad behavior (and yes, they did finally change some of their proposals - but why this company gets to repurpose sat freqs at no extra cost for terrestrial use is ridiculous). .
It's more or less the same process where a developer buys land cheap and then with the help of a corrupt government rezones that land to something more valuable.
The FCC can rezone, they generally then run an auction, keep lots of $$ for the govt, and kick some back to others if needed especially if they force folks like TV stations to move their station broadcasts.
Lightsquared 100% lied when they said they would use the spectrum to serve 100% of users with a sat service. That was a necessary process for the original transfer (like for like use).
And the value they are getting is huge. 40MHz of nationwide bandwidth. Easily worth 10Billion plus.
Be totally fine for FCC to rezone using a normal process, auction to normal business at fair market value, protecting or compensating existing users.
I thought Garmin / Trimble and basically every GPS company had sued them because of how terrible their proposals and behavior has been.
This is not traditional 5G, it's basically misusing satellite spectrum.