September 9, 2022
NTIA Statement on National Academies of Sciences Report:
The Report from the National Academies indicates that Ligado’s terrestrial operations would cause harmful interference to GPS devices and that a number of the FCC’s mitigations would be practically unworkable. NTIA will review this detailed Report more carefully, but we believe this offers the Commission an important opportunity to reconsider Ligado’s authorization.
U.S. Department of Defense Press Release on the NASEM Section 1663 Report:
As required by Congress in section 1663 of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) committee recently released its study on Ligado’s planned deployment of terrestrial services and its potential to interfere with GPS capabilities essential for DoD’s mission execution. National security missions that our service men and women execute every day are of the utmost importance and require a solution that ensures continued operations of critical systems.
The NASEM study confirms that Ligado’s system will interfere with DoD GPS receivers, which include high-precision GPS receivers. The study also confirms that Iridium satellite communications will experience harmful interference caused by Ligado user terminals. Further, the study notes that when DoD’s testing approach, which is based on signal-to-noise ratio, iscorrectly applied, it is the more comprehensive and informativeapproach to assessing interference. The study also concludes that the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) proposed mitigation and replacement measures are impractical, cost prohibitive, and possibly ineffective.
These conclusions are consistent with DoD’s longstanding view that Ligado’s system will interfere with critical GPS receivers and that it is impractical to mitigate the impact of that interference.
DoD looks forward to continuing to work with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, FCC and Ligado on this complex and important issue.
Statement from Iridium Communications:
The findings from NAS are consistent with the opposition from 14 federal agencies, more than 80 stakeholders, and Iridium’s concerns that Ligado’s proposed operations will cause harmful interference. The NAS study clearly demonstrates what the rest of the industry has known for years: the prior FCC order failed to fully consider the risk of harmful interference posed to mission-critical satellite systems. Iridium urges the FCC to take swift action to reverse the order before Ligado starts its technical demonstrations this Fall.