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December 26, 2011

Here's a quick question for you-- if a certified first responder emergency worker gets interference on his GPS receiver and that this greatly interferes in his or her job at saving lives since the GPS radio is being drowned out by a nearby cell phone transmitter, should a cell phone user still deserve access to a much less critical service?

That's a very good question, but it’s also a question that should have been asked in 2001, when the Federal Communications Commission first licensed dual-mode communications next to GPS bands, just before millions of GPS receivers were built and sold across the United States and elsewhere.

This is in direct relation to the several news stories that Wireless Industry News has been covering for the past several months regarding a wireless service provider called LightSquared. The whole issue stems from the fact that LightSquared's mobile network causes severe interference to ctitical GPS services used today to locate vehicles, help commercial airline pilots land their planes in bad weather and other such mission-critical applications. And you can read many of them here:

1) LightSquared admits its network places GPS nav systems at risk

2) LightSquared is grilled by Congress over GPS interference issues

3) LightSquared says it has a solution to its GPS interference issues?

4) LightSquared steps up its offensive against the GPS industry

5) Sprint and LightSquared make a deal, share network spectrum

6) LightSquared has found another solution to its ill-designed network?

7) LightSquared becomes a MVNE, doesn't care about the interference it causes to GPS

8) Is FCC's Chairman Julius Genachowski in bed with LightSquared?

9) The GPS Coalition forces LightSquared to be on its best behavior

10) LightSquared in the news again, claims it has fixed GPS interference issues

11) LightSquared is rapidly running out of cash, files petition with the FCC

Those news stories will help you better comprehend the scope of the whole issue, and how critical it is to the public's overall safety. But now, according to a recent government report leaked to Bloomberg and then described in a very basic news release from the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing, extensive testing of the proposed LightSquared cellular network “found no significant interference with cellular phones.”

A U.S. Commerce Department spokesman by the name of Bill Mosley was since contacted to determine whether this referred to cellphone voice communications, or the separate GPS function in many phones. Because if LightSquared doesn’t interfere with cellphone GPS chips, that would undermine a key argument of the GPS industry.

Manufacturers of the popular navigation devices such as Garmin and others say that it is technically and economically impossible to shield them fully from GPS interference on LightSquared’s neighboring frequencies. If that’s correct, how can cellphone manufacturers claim that they fixed the interference issue when in fact it would appear that they didn't?

Mosley declined to answer our question, so we tracked down an engineer with direct knowledge both of the government interference testing and the design of cellphone GPS chips to find out more. He confirmed that cellphone GPS chips were unaffected in the LightSquared tests.

“The radio technology using RF frequencies inside cellphones is very different,” he told us, speaking on condition of anonymity mainly because he doesn’t want to get dragged into the contentious fight between Phil Falcone’s LightSquared and practically everybody else in the wireless industry. "The GPS technology in a typical cellphone has to deal with interference from the cellphone itself, so there is more filtering.”

Cellular phones, he said, are inherently “more robust because they have to live in a small package with a transmitter.” There are good technical reasons why it will be hard for the GPS industry to shield its devices from signals on the “upper 10? of LightSquared’s 20 megaherz of wireless spectrum next to the GPS band, this engineer said.

Firstly, GPS receivers have to pick up extremely weak radio signals from satellites orbiting 12,000 miles up in the sky, and that requires receivers that pull in as broad a swath of spectrum as possible. Filters that screen out all emissions below a certain threshold are extremely expensive and complex, he said. Even the successful cellphone filters only shielded them against ground-based transmissions in the “lower 10,” leaving a 10-mhz buffer zone.

“Is it possible to put a filter in a cellphone to filter against the upper 10? That would be really, really difficult,” he said. That probably explains why LightSquared has all but conceded that it can’t light up its transmitters on the “upper 10.”

If this is true, it flies directly in the face of the FCC who authorized all that spectrum to help build an unlimited number of ground stations covering the entire 20-mhz swath of spectrum back in 2001.

Ultimately, this engineer said, “the GPS community has special needs.” The FCC rules require users of one slice of wireless spectrum to avoid interfering with another, and LightSquared spent millions of dollars on filters that prevent its radios from transmitting on GPS frequencies.

But now, with more than 300 million GPS receivers out there designed to listen to not only GPS frequencies but neighboring bands, there are critical issues on the ground that will likely prevent LightSquared from making full use of its FCC-licensed spectrum.

“The GPS band is special, but the rules aren’t special,” the engineer said. The argument comes down to public safety versus commercial rights, he added. So the key question here is, does the FCC find itself in a pickle today after it authorized the spectrum more than ten years ago?

It now appears that LightSquared could be running out of cash, and the company says it has filed a petition for a Declaratory Ruling with the FCC for confirmation of its right to continue to exist.

LightSquared was expecting a decision by the end of 2011, but confidence in its various plans has been shaken by the selective leaking of test results and ongoing claims that the GPS industry is too big to be put at risk, so now LightSquared is demanding that the FCC state unequivocally that GPS manufacturers have no right to protection, or restitution, from LightSquared's business model.

The issue is that weak GPS signals are right beside the frequencies that LightSquared uses for mobile telephones, and that is where the source of the GPS interference comes from. The FCC granted LightSquared a licence to use that wireless spectrum, including a change of use as the bands were previously reserved for satellite-phones only.

The issue is that some GPS equipment listens to that spectrum too broadly, and can thus pick up and be overwhelmed by the neighbouring signal from LightSquared's ill-designed network.

As the company's petition explains: "The commercial GPS industry has manufactured, and sold to unsuspecting consumers, unlicensed and poorly designed GPS receivers that listen for radio signals both in the RNSS GPS frequency band as well as across the adjacent MSS frequency band that is not intended for GPS use, and in which LightSquared is licensed".

LightSquared has already agreed to abandon its upper frequency (which is right next to the GPS bands) and has reduced the transmission power in the lower band as well as edging away to reduce leakage. It has also financed the development of GPS filters which it claims would allow any GPS equipment to coexist with the LightSquared network for a few dollars (once fitted).

Even without the filters, LightSquared says the other mitigations mean every mobile phone tested works fine, so it's only the very high-precision (or very cheaply made) GPS receivers which remain at issue.

The GPS industry wants the neighbouring bands kept clear forever, to protect a service which is too important to risk by filling nearby frequencies with telephony. But legally, that argument holds very little water, despite that it's persuasive reasoning.

There are millions of GPS devices being used daily, and while most of them won't need better filters, a significant number of them will.

The problem, for the FCC, is that LightSquared has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the venture, so the FCC is going to have to find a good reason to reject the claim or risk being sued for going back on the agreement.

And LightSquared needs to soon raise even more cash, but no one is going to invest in anything until the FCC makes a public decision, which is why this petition has been filed.

In other mobile news

Japan's three largest wireless carriers-- DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank have joined together to ensure that mobile subscribers can transition from the outdated FeliCa platform to the modern NFC (near field communications) payment system. The decision imitates that of other mobile service operators around the globe, who have realized that if they're going to prevent Google (and perhaps even Apple) from dominating mobile payments, then they're going to have to provide cross-operator standards for companies interested in developing NFC applications.

In the United States, Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile formed a consortium called ISIS last year, while in the United Kingdom, wireless operators are still trying to come up with something similar.

Japan have settled on "The Japanese Mobile NFC Consortium". When a bank in Japan decides to deploy a phone-based version of its credit card, it only has to create one app which can then be distributed to any network operator, just as Japanese banks can already do with the proprietary FeliCa platform, which is only compatible with the rapidly growing Near Field Communications standard.

For its part, Google is already handling application distribution to its NFC Android handsets, supporting applications from Visa and MasterCard in its Google Wallet, though so far only Google itself, and Citibank, have created suitable applications.

But nevertheless, the FeliCa platform is still worthy of attention, as it already supports a range of other payment applications which are likely to find their way into the NFC ecosystem anyway, such as airline boarding passes and customer loyalty programs.

Those are the applications from which wireless carriers hope to make money from, having largely given up trying to collect a percentage of every transaction, and leaving that to the banks which are better equipped and prepared for that.

In other mobile news

Various hacktivists have released what looks like a manipulated version of a popular Android application to commemorate a Tunisian man whose Jihad suicide triggered anti-government protests in his country in late 2010.

Twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazi set himself on fire after local government officials refused to meet him and discuss his grievances.

Bouazi's self-immolation propelled Tunisians' general frustration with their politicians into a wave of protests that forced out President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early January. Ben Ali was the first Middle East dictator to be tossed out of office by the "Arab Spring" protest movement that spread to Egypt, Libya and to several other Middle East countries.

Altered versions of the popular Android app Al Salah, which calculates prayer times and orientates believers towards Mecca, have begun appearing on various forums dedicated to Middle Eastern issues. The Trojanised builds of the software sends links to a tribute to Bouazi as SMS messages to everyone on the contact list of an infected phone.

The process occurs silently in the background and without victims knowing about it, and it's not asking for permission to spread the martyr's message.

Analysis of the Trojan virus by Symantec suggests it doesn't do anything especially malign. Curiously, if an infected smartphone is located in Bahrain, the application attempts to download a PDF file onto the phone's SD card.

"Overall, the PDF file was examined and does not contain any malicious code or exploits," writes Symantec's Irfan Asrar. "The report itself is a fact-finding inquiry by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry on allegations of human rights violations."

"There has been a lot of discussion regarding the impact of the internet, social media, and even the availability of cheap mobile phones on the uprisings in the Middle East. In a way, this threat is a testament to the rise of Hacktisivm 2.0."

Symantec's Norton Mobile Security detects the threat as Android-Arspam. Self-immolation as a form of extreme political protest is a centuries-old tradition in some cultures. A number of Buddhist monks, including most famously Thich Quang Duc, set fire to themselves as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists under the Roman Catholic administration of South Vietnam.

The practice spread to the former Soviet bloc, with the self-immolation of Czech student Jan Palach, and more recently to the Middle East and North Africa. Bouazi's death inspired a number of copycat protests both in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.

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