From the article:
> The House Appropriations Committee today approved the fiscal year 2012 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. One amendment to the bill prohibits funding for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to remove conditions on or permit certain commercial broadband operations until the FCC has resolved concerns of harmful interference by these operations on GPS devices. The amendment was adopted on a voice vote.
>
> According to an eWeek news analysis, the prohibition means that the FCC is effectively barred from any further consideration of LightSquared’s plan, since even meeting to discuss the plan spends federal funds through employee salaries. Until LightSquared comes up with a plan that completely protects existing GPS navigation devices from interference, LightSquared cannot operate its satellite-based broadband service.
Read the full article here.
And then there's this:
> LightSquared Goes Global; GLONASS, Galileo May Be at Risk, Too
> Recent events, some of them summarized here, may appear to have dealt setbacks to LightSquared, the boundless opportunist of wireless broadband that just happens to interfere with GPS. But the company has not run out of moves yet. Would you, if you had $20 billion at stake? The latest gambit, led by lawyers and cloaked in jargon, appears to be an end-run around the U.S. government to appeal to the International Telecommunications Union, which has ultimate and international authority over spectrum. Watch out, GLONASS and Galileo — and U.S. troops operating in foreign theaters.
http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/lightsquared-goes-global-glonass-galileo-may-be-risk-too-11822
Don't count your chickens yet. Bills have to go through the full House, then the Senate committee"s) and floor, then be signed by the President. I don't think we're there yet.
It does mean things when the House Appropriations Committee writes the budget.
From this little tidbit, I would guess that the Lightsquared is dead!
wow... thank you so much for posting this. I was unaware of this pending situation.:-|
That's great news but it's hard to believe they're going to give up. They've got waaaay too much money invested already.
Hey "C" Billingsley, do you have family in LV? Long shot I know, but just wondering?
CV
Hopefully Lightsquared will take a common sense approach and move to a spectrum for ground-based transmitters.
Congressional Committee Blocks FCC Approval of LightSquaredF
For what it's worth, there was a full page Lightsquared ad in the Albuquerque (NM) Journal today.
No, not that I'm aware of. Most of my family is in the southeast.
Was it surveyors, military and aviation users OR a budget measure that swayed the President?
RADU
The pres will just issue a signing statement that he will not enforce it. Would not be the first time that he does that. This is far from over.
None of the above. This is so far from the President's desk that anything could happen. This has not even reached the floor of the house. Still a long way to go.
Thanks for the good news.
One step at a time GEORGIA.:-)
> Was it surveyors, military and aviation users OR a budget measure that swayed the President?
>
>
RADU,
Surveyors No because we don't have enough clout,
Military No because if it would harm them the Lightsquared project would not have gotten this far,
That leads to Aviation and Machine control, especially Agribusiness, think ADM, Cargill etc that's where the big bucks are.
