LightSquared says recent GPS testing was unfair, shrouded in secrecy

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LightSquared held a media briefing today to take to task the recent reports of testing of GPS receivers against its proposed network. The recent tests said that LightSquared's network would cause interference with GPS devices and be harmful to the use of them in various applications that include aviation and defense systems.

LightSquared's rebuttal to the reports claims that the testing was done in secrecy and not by an independent lab, but by the GPS industry itself. The company states that the GPS industry was given the opportunity to test devices that were obsolete and would not ever have been sold to consumers as they were tested. LightSquared also complained that the threshold of failure for the test was not indicative of real-world interference.

LightSquared has been trying to gain federal approval for its proposed 4G LTE^(INFO) network for the better part of the past year, and has signed numerous wholesale and development agreements - most notable of which was with Sprint - that hinge on the network gaining approval and being deployed. Sprint has given LightSquared until the end of the month to gain federal approval for its network before it will take action to end the agreement between the two companies.