Monday, March 19, 2012

LightSquared Fight Postmortem (Maybe)

PhilBoxing Forum

When, in the middle of last month, the FCC gave the victor's nod to GPS as being more important to the nation than having increased broadband coverage through LightSquared, pretty much everyone thought the fat lady had sung for LightSquared.  Even more so when last week LightSquared's customers and vendors refused to get back on the bus for the return trip to the practice gym.  First, potential  customer Cricket announced it would be switching services to Clearwire, then Sprint delivered the somewhat expected news it would not be providing buildout of the LightSquared system.  However, buried in that flurry of negative news was the revelation that LightSquared had hired one of the best legal-guns-for-hire, Ted Olson.  As the very highly-regarded former Solicitor General of the United States, Mr. Olson's hiring was the clear signal LightSquared was preparing for litigation against the FCC.  On Friday, Light Squared started down that road when it filed an objection to the defacto legal protection GPS had been granted in the FCC's mid-February ruling; one which allowed GPS to - as LightSquared would describe - squat on LightSquared's assigned frequency band.  Go here to read:


Comment: Perhaps the analogy of a hockey player would have been a better way to describe this mess when the discussion first started nearly a year ago.  After all, as a Northern Minnesota hockey prodigy, Mr. Falcone knows all about getting checked into the boards.  And clearly, the guy is still on his skates.  More to come......if needed, before the ice melts.

No comments:

Post a Comment