The report, required by Congress to get to the bottom of whether Ligado’s network would interfere with DoD capabilities, classifies much of the military impact.
By THERESA HITCHENS on September 09, 2022 at 11:00 AM
WASHINGTON — A congressionally mandated report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds that while “most” commercial GPS receivers will not be jammed by Ligado’s controversial 5G wireless network, Iridium’s mobile satellite services used by the Pentagon might experience “harmful interference.”
However, the report, released today, classifies any findings on the direct impact to Defense Department systems and missions, an unsatisfactory result for many of those looking for a solid, confirmed answer on whether Ligado’s network will harm DoD operations moving forward.
While stressing that no specific information was presented “as part of the committee’s public study,” the report does offer one clue that NAS may have found the situation for military systems to be less dire than DoD has asserted up to now. The report says that NAS “believes that it is reasonable to assume that DoD Authorized/Compliant Devices are expected to withstand willful interference under substantially higher power than is authorized” by the FCC.
The NAS was tasked by the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to review the Federal Communications Commission’s 2020 order that allowed Ligado to use radio frequency bands generally reserved for satellite operations by its planned 5G terrestrial mobile phone network. The FCC’s decision piqued fierce backlash from the Defense Department and supporters in Congress, as well as other government agencies — with senior officials vociferously arguing that Ligado’s wireless cell towers would drown out signals from the Global Positioning System positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) satellites.