Sprint extends LightSquared approval deadline to March

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Sprint will give LightSquared six more weeks to gain regulatory approval for its proposed 4G LTE network before it backs out of the agreement between the two companies. Sprint had initially set a deadline of December 31, 2011 for approval, which it later extended to January 31, 2012.

If LightSquared is unable to get approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its network by the middle of March, Sprint could back out of the $15 billion agreement to build network infrastructure and share airwaves that it signed with LightSquared last year.

LightSquared has faced a lot of opposition to its network from the GPS industry because LTE running on LightSquared's spectrum, which neighbors that used by GPS, causes interference with precision GPS devices. LightSquared has spent much of the last year coming up with solutions to the interference and arguing its right to use the spectrum for a terrestrial network, but it has yet to gain federal approval to do so. [via CNET]