By Matthew Lasar
LightSquared is furious over a news report suggesting that, in various trials, the satellite broadband company's proposed transmission system bumps into GPS devices around 75 percent of the time. A leaked preliminary draft of the government test report quotes the document concluding that LightSquared signals "caused harmful interference to majority of GPS receivers tested" and that "No additional testing is required to confirm harmful interference exists."
The experimentation, which was carried out between October 31 and November 4, showed that 69 of 92 GPS receivers "experienced harmful interference" when within 100 meters of a LightSquared base station, according to the Bloomberg story.
But the disclosure was foul play, LightSquared executives protested in a Monday telephone conference call. And [they claimed that] the data is a "distortion of the truth."