America’s wireless broadband problem just got a lot worse

The issue of America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t just about bridges, highways, and railroads. It’s also about the overburdened cellular networks that power our wireless broadband and have become an indispensable part of our lives and our economy.

Little highlights the difficulty of fixing that electronic infrastructure better than the news that the FCC just clobbered a company that wanted to build a wholesale wireless broadband network. The reason: Its technology would allegedly interfere with GPS transmissions. The LightSquared case highlights an infrastructure issue that simply won’t go away: the shortage of spectrum and the difficulty of building out wireless data services.

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“Everyone wants an aggressive broadband rollout and they want it quickly, but demand has accelerated to the point that innovative solutions are going to hit roadblocks like interference,” says Michael Voellinger, a vice president at the Telwares telecommunications consultancy. “We’re still dealing with an antiquated spectrum strategy, and the risk is there for some serious time and money to be wasted — which appears to be the case for LightSquared.”

The spectrum shortrage may or may not be real today, but it will be soon

Driven by bandwidth-heavy applications like streaming video and Skype, wireless broadband service is being strained as never before. Simply put, the carriers don’t have space in the airwaves to, well, carry all that content. If that doesn’t get fixed, and fixed soon, ambitious plans to build out 4G networks in populated areas and to expand cellular broadband service to underserved parts of the country will falter. You think AT&T’s data service is bad now, just wait until even more people buy and use iPhones, Androids, and Windows 8 tablets.

But like everything connected to wireless, there’s a nuance here. No one would disagree that today’s spectrum is overcrowded. But is that because there simply isn’t enough to go around, or is it because the carriers aren’t using what they have very well? In other words, is there really a shortage of spectrum, or is there a constraint caused by carriers’ poor use? As I said, it’s a nuance. But if you care about the future of wireless, this isn’t simply an academic issue.

For example, AT&T claimed it needed to buy T-Mobile because the smaller company’s spectrum would fix AT&T’s overtaxed data network. If AT&T was being honest, that would mean the Obama administration made a terrible mistake when it challenged the deal, forcing AT&T to abandon its plans. If AT&T, as many believe, was only interested in removing a competitor from the playing field, the spectrum issue may have been a fig-leaf excuse not to spend the money optimizing its network.

It’s very difficult to get to the bottom of the spectrum issue. What is clear, though, is that it will take an enormous amount of somebody’s money to build out a wireless infrastructure capable enough to meet the explosion of demand. Although there are questions as to whether today’s bandwidth availability is being artificially limited, there’s no question that wireless demand is exploding and will continue to do so.

That need for wireless, and the feds’ desire to have a new wireless competitor to keep AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint more honest, is why LightSquared’s investors poured millions of dollars into the company after the FCC early last year gave it tentative approval to go ahead. Even if the FCC was right in blocking the LightSquared project (that’s not altogether clear), investors will now think more than twice before backing another innovative or competitive wireless project. And there’s already been some partisan political mudslinging in Washington, D.C., about the project, which helps no one.

What’s more, the technical issues behind the rejection of the LightSquared application (which I’ll explain in a bit) highlight the difficulty of expanding the fragile wireless infrastructure that we all use every day, no matter who builds it.

Does LightSquared threaten aviation and agriculture? You can’t see or smell or feel radiofrequency spectrum, but it is there. And it is not an unlimited resource. Radio and television signals use it up, as do Wi-Fi, garage door openers, cordless and cellular phones, and all sorts of communications networks we never notice. When there isn’t enough in a particular range or signals are too close to each other, something isn’t going to work. National governments have partitioned that spectrum into bands that are allocated for specific purposes, to prevent such interference.

That’s exactly the issue that tripped up LightSquared. The hedge-fund-backed company had proposed building a wireless network big enough to serve millions of customers. Rather than push the service itself, it would have acted as a wholesaler, selling its capacity to carriers and other providers. LightSquared had already reached an agreement to work with Sprint to expand its 4G network. Sorry, Sprint. Look elsewhere.

The slice of spectrum LightSquared wants to use is right next to that used by GPS devices. There’s been an argument about whether LightSquared’s broadband network would interfere with GPS-based navigation equipment because of signal leakage. At one point, LightSquared agreed to scale back its plans to address those objections.

But this week, an arm of the Commerce Department said that scaling back won’t work. “There is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference [with GPS devices] at this time,” the agency said in a letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, who had strongly backed LightSquared’s application. The letter notes that the Federal Aviation Administration says LightSquared’s technology would have interfered with GPS devices used for aircraft navigation.

That last claim is scary, of course. But LightSquared argues the testing was flawed and tilted in favor of GPS providers, so it needs to be further evaluated. That probably won’t happen, and it’s quite likely that LightSquared and many millions of dollars are going away for good.

If the technology really is flawed, that’s simply the risk that investors in any new technology have to bear, and I’m not sorry for them. But the technical issues behind the denial are knotty. The interference between LightSquared signals and the GPS band isn’t exactly the fault of LightSquared’s technology. It appears that GPS devices “hear” signals in adjacent bands of spectrum and get confused. Whose fault is that?

Jeff Carlisle, LightSquared’s executive vice president for regulatory affairs and public policy, wrote on the company’s blog this week that the GPS industry had apparently become “too big to fail” and is seeking protection from the federal government for its own mistakes. “GPS manufacturers have been selling devices that listen into frequencies outside of their assigned spectrum band — namely into LightSquared’s licensed band,” Carlisle wrote. “The GPS industry has leveraged years of insider relationships and massive lobbying dollars to make sure that they don’t have to fix the problem they created.”

Suppose he’s right. How many years and millions or billions of dollars would it take to fix the GPS devices that do everything from help fly airplanes to keep giant tractors on course as they till the fields? Tractor maker John Deere is one of the companies that opposes LightSquared, in yet another illustration of how complex and far-reaching the wireless infrastructure really is. Even if the GPS makers are at fault, should the government give LightSquared the go-ahead, consequences be damned? You can see why the feds finally said no, despite wanting LightSquared to succeed.

Still, the underlying problem needs to get fixed, and the solution is way above my pay grade. Even if these issues are somehow addressed, it will be quite a while before these issues are solved. And that means you shouldn’t expect to see ubiquitous 4G services for some time. If they aren’t addressed, you may never see them.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here (Add a comment) so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “America’s wireless broadband problem just got a lot worse,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.