Pentagon official: FCC decision on 5G threatens GPS, national security

*edited for spelling

Do you have a citation for that?

I would have thought the issue is not that GPS receivers don't use filters, but rather than no filter has a perfectly sharp cut-off and GPS signals are exceptionally faint.

For example, if the GPS signal is 0.1 femtowatts at 1575MHz, even if you've got a filter that can remove 99.99999% of a noise signal at 1600MHz you can still overwhelm the GPS signal with 1 nanowatt of power.

Every GPS receiver in existence uses filtering. The question is, how sharp does that filter have to be? The GPS frequencies were chosen to be away from frequencies used by transmitters that might be near GPS receivers. Lightsquared proposed repurposing satellite downlink frequencies (which they bought at a discount because this restriction limited their use) for the purposes of terrestrial networking, breaking that assumption. In order to maintain similar functionality, GPS receivers would require significantly sharper filters, increasing bulk, cost, and complexity.

This sounds more dramatic than it is - my WiFi signal from less than 10 feet away is approximately 1 nanowatt, or approximately 10^8 times weaker than when it left the AP radio. Thats just how RF works.

The FCC licenses bandwidth, no one owns it.

The FCC can rezone, they generally then run an auction, keep lots of $$ for the govt, and kick some back to others if needed especially if they force folks like TV stations to move their station broadcasts.

Lightsquared 100% lied when they said they would use the spectrum to serve 100% of users with a sat service. That was a necessary process for the original transfer (like for like use).

And the value they are getting is huge. 40MHz of nationwide bandwidth. Easily worth 10Billion plus.

Be totally fine for FCC to rezone using a normal process, auction to normal business at fair market value, protecting or compensating existing users.

That said, I agree with you about Huawei and non-5G. We shouldn't be talking about banning them on 5G, we should be talking about banning them (and anyone outside of the western alliance, really) from selling gear in our countries period. National security takes precedent. China doesn't even let reporters from the NYT in their country ffs.

But whatever. Politicians are reactive and don't understand cybersecurity and the few that do don't have the sway or incentives to really push for this. Though I will say one thing, in a cyberwar we'd brick China just as badly as they would brick us, so at least we have MAD working for us.

> Infected microchips from Chinese suppliers used to target and destroy the US Pacific fleet.

Awesome, the ideas that are often posted here have somehow made their way into fiction.

> Disabling GPS with anti-satellite missiles.

Just GPS? I'd expect surveillance and communications satellites to be much higher priority targets.

Also, signal disruption is already very common as a necessary precaution at sensitive times and places. I think many military bases and other sensitive places, like the Kremlin, have signal interference so they are very imprecise to target with GPS-guided weapons.

- It's shorter-range, so coverage will be spotty for a long time

- It doesn't go through buildings, so even the urban centers most likely to get the first towers will have spotty coverage

- It will require buying a new device, which OEMs love but the average person won't

- That device will take a hit in battery life

And all of this for ludicrously-fast new speeds on mobile devices that we'll use for... what exactly? We can already stream HD video over 4G. What experience is 5G, assuming you actually have access to it, going to improve?

I'm sure we can contrive some use-cases like streaming VR video or whatever (even though all current phone-based VR platforms have been sunsetted), but I'm extremely skeptical that it will do anything to make the average user's mobile experience better in any meaningful way.

Within the last year, we denied Verizon's 5G proposal. They want to run fiber and wireless backhaul to provide indoor access for some buildings. It's also important to watch which door these proposals come through. It's a tell as to what their actual agenda is.

It never will be though. Whatever frequencies you can do wirelessly you can do over a wire without the interference of other users using the same frequency at the same time.

Also a lot of promises 5G offers only sound good on paper. The higher frequencies don't travel well through walls (that's why it uses lower frequencies as well) and the maximum speed being talked can only be obtained during tests, but in the real deployment it has to be shared over all users.

Another problem is that the speeds don't mean sh*t if we have the same data caps, in fact higher speed is worse, because many applications will switch to a higher bitrate and consume more data, even when there's no noticeable difference on a phone.

You listed the theoretical advantages of 5G. Whether or not the practice mirrors theory is debatable. But I can't help but noticed you missed listing any disadvantage. Most people are completely unaware of any because they don't make it in the marketing leaflets.

When you say 5G I can just as well read: I want close range, LoS connections, substantially higher power consumption for devices and increased complexity, higher costs, security concerns, and the inability to take advantage of the speed not only because it's purely theoretical but because data plans did not keep up in 99.9% of the world.

Listing only benefits can make even an amputation sound like a great way to keep weight off. I'm all for new tech and advancements but if it feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back then it's not much of an advancement. It's half baked and pushed just to sell "the new stuff".

Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.

Already possible with 4G/3G in many Asian countries. Your provider just sucks.

> I want ultra fast reliable telecom in crowded cities.

See above.

> I want cellular that is competitive with cable internet.

Not gonna happen. FFTX is already at 10Gbp, and it is going higher as time pass.

We don't have this today mainly because wireless carriers do the minimum required to compete with their minimal competition. It doesn't have that much to do with 4G vs. 5G or whatever. Even living in a city, I don't expect 5G to improve the situation all that much, unless carriers start really spending on their network.

The ubiquity, reliability, and bandwidth will only be there if carriers make huge investments in their networks, which I don't expect will happen.

You can certainly get what you want today, with 4G/LTE. You just have to go to a country with carriers that actually prioritize that, like Taiwan or Japan (and probably several other east/southeast Asian countries).

And IoT devices typically require tiny throughput. Is your electricity meter pumping out 4K video?

> That is complex, but most likely no. Like the FAA they largely respect the civilian agencies but ultimately they exist outside of that civilian regulation

Indeed, the DOD can do pretty much what they like regardless of what the FCC says. Of course, it all works better if everybody stays in their own sandbox, so the DOD does, by-and-large.

In general, government frequency allocations and usage are coordinated by the NTIA Office of Spectrum Management. But here again, the NTIA OSM negotiates with the DOD, they can't enforce anything on the DOD.

I remember reading at some point that the civilian GPS was randomly offset so as not to give extremely accurate coordinates like the military GPS does. I thought that was interesting, if true.

Doesn't 5G use higher frequency than that?

Is the company, a satellite company, trying to use their satellites to provide 5G or something? So if the interference starts at the satellites, it could affect other parts of the world?

>“We have presented to the FCC a proposal to utilize our terrestrial midband spectrum as a greenfield opportunity that is aligned with the commission’s stated goals of providing the foundation of the 5G future,” explained Doug Smith, Ligado president and CEO. “By deploying 40 megahertz of smart capacity on midband spectrum, we can create a model of at least a partial 5G network — a next-generation, hybrid satellite-terrestrial network — that will enable 5G use cases and mobile applications that require ultra-reliable, highly secure and pervasive connectivity.”