Sprint, Lightsquared Deal Ends After Regulators Found That Startup's Network Interfered With GPS

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. ended its spectrum hosting agreement with start-up LightSquared, whose network looks doomed because regulators say it interferes with GPS navigation devices.

Sprint is returning $65 million in prepayments to LightSquared.

The deal between the companies had called for Sprint to collaborate with LightSquared on its LTE, or long-term evolution, network. Sprint said Friday that LightSquared has so far been unable to find a way to resolve interference issues.

LightSquared said in a statement that Sprint's decision to end the agreement was not unexpected, given regulators' actions.

The ended deal won't hurt customers, Sprint said. The country's No. 3 wireless carrier is also upgrading its own network to use LTE technology, and said it will launch its 4G LTE network in the middle of 2012.

Analysts have said that absorbing the cost of upgrading its data network over the next few years will be a big challenge for Sprint.

The Overland Park, Kan., company's stock shed 2 cents to $2.78 in early morning trading.

Comments

[bmldisp1001]

12:43 PM on 03/18/2012

I doubt that Lightsquared can recover. Which is a pity. We need more bandwidth. We can afford filtering on GPS devices - they're dirt cheap already, and getting cheaper. The FCC is focusing on the wrong constraints.

[Mickey Bitsko]

09:07 PM on 03/16/2012

Sprint would be best served trying to implement newer approaches to infrastructure and service proactivity rather than continue to be a 'me-too' provider.

[J0E1]

11:55 AM on 03/16/2012

Can't wait for some quad-core LTE phones on Sprint.

[jsarets]

03:57 PM on 03/16/2012

These mobile application platforms rarely have more than two threads that can run at any given clock tick. This is getting even more true with Android ICS, because parts of the graphics library which used to run on the ARM cores are now running on the GL cores.

As much as I'm not an Apple fan, they have the right idea with the A5X, where they stuck with two ARM cores but doubled the GL cores from two to four. The critical loads are almost exclusively graphics rendering and video decoding, and both of those are implemented in GL.

Also, GL code scales very well across multiple cores, whereas ARM code generally doesn't. The PowerVR architecture scales particularly well, since their tile-based rendering pipeline allows for a simple mapping between tiles and cores. More cores each render fewer tiles per frame.

What you really want to see on the ARM side is Cortex A15 or Qualcomm Krait. These ARM chips have dual-channel memory controllers and three out-of-order execution pipelines per core. This gives you 50% more instructions per clock under heavy single-threaded loads.

Intel has a really great mantra about battery life: "hurry up and get idle". These mobile applications usually want to do one thing at a time. Do that one thing as quickly as possible and then drop the core into the low-power idle mode as soon as possible. Single-thread performance is key to maximizing time spent in idle mode and, in turn, maximizing battery life.

Unfortunately for Intel, ARM gets better single-thread performance per watt...