US Military Is Furious At FCC Over 5G Plan That Could Interfere With GPS 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said.
The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved."
"Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.
The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved."
"Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.
Who is 5G for? (Score:2)
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly improved network service. It doesn't provide any range increase, but it does allow a much larger number of devices active within a cell, and smaller cells. Essential for continued scalability in urban areas, especially with the looming prospect of putting a cellular interface in every power, gas and water meter, every car, and potentially every streetlight and traffic signal so they can be remotely operated.
Also more throughput and lower latency.
There's another end to the problem: GPS signals, due to the long transmission range, wide coverage and limited power budget at the transmitter, are pathetically weak. It does not take very much noise to interfere with them.
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:4)
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I happen to be a reservist and am not furious. Finish up high school...
Wait, you finished high school and you still thought you personally were the collective noun? Wow.
it shows.
LMAO
If you're really in the military, you better hope you don't do anything important and your CO isn't monitoring your internet activity. Because the people at the top of the military leadership decide how you feel, not you. That's part of what it means to be a soldier.
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Why do we need GPS?
We have GPS, for the military. It is an established system, and the military informs us that it is necessary. Therefore it is militarily necessary, unless proven otherwise. And it isn't provable.
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They allow ordinary citizens to use it.
If they don't like it they can cut it off for you
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, "it ain't broke, don't fix it?" Ah, you're thinking like a rational and practical human, probably with technical aptitude (like me).
Put economics and greed first and you'll understand why we "need" 5G. ("need" is in quotes because I don't believe we need 5G. If it's really better, maybe okay, but not if it clobbers anything existing, especially things like GPS.)
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Cost savings in meter readings. Cars that automatically update their maps and receive traffic updates. Traffic signals that can be monitored and dynamically configured to route around forming congestion before traffic grinds to a halt. There are potential benefits to be had. Though I have no doubt the network operators will be sure to wring every cent they can from it as well.
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost savings in meter readings. Cars that automatically update their maps and receive traffic updates. Traffic signals that can be monitored and dynamically configured to route around forming congestion before traffic grinds to a halt.
We do all of those things already without 5G.
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What you do at the moment with 5G and the continued progression and expansion of what it is you're doing without 5G was one of the primary design considerations when creating 5G.
You're one of those IPv4 will be fine for ever because I can still post on Slashdot right now guys aren't you. All the things we currently do we will be able to do in the future, more of, cheaper, better, that's was the primary design purpose of 5G.
Also much of what you think you're doing with 4G / LTE is currently also being done w
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Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost savings in meter readings.
Not really. I'm on my fourth power meter at my house. The first one needed to be read by people driving around in pickup trucks every month. Very expensive. Then, the local power company switched to its own short range RF network with repeaters installed on each block in town or a reader that one person could drive down the road with, reading meters on the fly. Much cheaper, but they had to change out all the meters. Then the telecoms shit themselves. Because power companies were starting to get into the communications business. At one end of the business, a local power company strung fiber optic cables to local meter reader repeaters. And then started selling the excess capacity as TV, telephone and broadband. It cost the existing telecoms some tens of millions of dollars to undermine that operation and take it over. In our neighborhood, the telecoms just sold the power company on using its 2G network and abandoning the proprietary system. So I got my third meter. A few years later, telecoms went back to the power company sand said "Fooled you! We are shutting down 2G. We will sell you upgraded 3G meters, but this time at a profit." So now I'm on my fourth power meter (and third gas meter). The power company is looking back and saying that they should have kept their own in-house system. But they have been taken by so many suppliers (like the telecoms) that they were de-listed by the NYSE and are now kept on life support to pass profits through to these subcontractors.
All that other stuff, like traffic conditions, we have now. I have a GPS (bough for $10 at a garage sale) that receives its updates from an FM broadcast subcarrier.
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Why do we need everything to be connected to the internet through wireless?
Because wires are expensive, and not connecting things is even more expensive.
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Informative)
5G is for people who insist on not having internet at home, but rather streaming 4k Netflix over their cell phone connection. The phone company provides a wifi-like connection from 600 feet away, rather than using your own router 30 feet away. As one would expect, a router 600 feet away doesn't work as well as one 30 feet away. Because physics.
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I'll assume you mean 5G is more efficient than 3G or 4G for much more data. If so, okay, but they didn't have to choose frequencies that clobber GPS or other existing technologies.
Not sure what you meant by "insist on not having internet at home". Recently I was going to upgrade my perfectly adequate (honestly) DSL service to fiber / cable. Turns out I can upgrade my cell data plan for appreciably less $ than the land-based connection. And, that cell data plan is portable. And, at least there's some de
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5G is for people who insist on not having internet at home, but rather streaming 4k Netflix over their cell phone connection. The phone company provides a wifi-like connection from 600 feet away, rather than using your own router 30 feet away. As one would expect, a router 600 feet away doesn't work as well as one 30 feet away. Because physics.
It doesn't even penetrate window glass. Because physics.
You still have a wifi router 30 feet away. Because physics.
The purpose is to "free up" the bandwidth that currently lets your cell phone get a signal inside a building. And they replace it with something that only works out on the street, in places with access points every block, and inside of important venues with indoor repeaters. So you're way more likely to be needing to find a wifi access point that is 30 feet away.
Thank goodness the military need
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It doesn't even penetrate window glass. Because physics.
Of course GPS signals penetrate glass. Otherwise every dashboard GPS mapping unit would be worthless. Some car windshields have coatings or films that attenuate the GPS signals enough to cause problems, but it isn't the glass itself.
Citation: The signals travel by line of sight, meaning they will pass through clouds, glass and plastic but will not go through most solid objects, such as buildings and mountains. https://www.garmin.com/en-US/a... [garmin.com]
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not so much for speed, but for capacity. The airlink is more spectral efficient (a bit more so than the shift from HSPA to LTE), and you can have larger carrier sizes. HSPA maxed out at 5 Mhz carriers. LTE maxes out at 20 Mhz carriers. NR (5G) is I believe 100 Mhz carriers. LTE also begins losing efficiency from inter cell interference as you density the network (think of it like putting a bunch of wifi APs in the same room on the same channel. It won't scale and will have more interference the more APs you add), and NR is better at handling that, allowing greater cell density. Mobile data usage keeps increasing, so you need to build the capacity to handle it.
mmWave 5G (what Verizon is deploying for example) is fast with huge blocks of spectrum, but it can't penetrate anything really (a single wall will block it). Honestly, I don't see much use for it on mobile devices outside of stadiums, venues, and other high density places. Rather, it's being used as a last mile solution in place of fios / ftth. So instead of running a fiber to every house, they put a 5G base station on each block and install a small outdoor antenna to receive the signal. Cheaper deployment, and solves a lot of cost and headache in neighborhoods with underground utilities.
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5G is for higher volume telemetry. In crowdwd cities they have a hard time tracking everybody with the older tech.
Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Funny)
Silly rabbit, 5G is for spreading COVID.
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Whatever happened to the Dirty Trix Dept. run by Hefner?
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Re:Who is 5G for? (Score:5, Informative)
Issue is, Ligado (nee' Lightsquared) bought spectrum which was in the band plan for satellite use, right next to what GPS uses. Then, instead of using it for its intended and assigned purpose, they wanted to use it terrestrially. It's simply a bad idea, there's a huge difference on the ground between signals coming from orbit and ones in close proximity.
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To give intelligence services enough bandwidth and lower latency to track their own citizens activities in real time, in the guise of improved consumer services.
No need for concern though as there won't be anymore whistle blowers now we've exchanged tinfoil hats for masks so we can all be safe ^_^
As long as people do what they're told, they'll be fine but they'll never be free.
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I know I won't need it, and the army reacts like this?
Do you? Have you gone over the 100+ features and technical changes introduced by 5G and determine none of them apply to you? Or do you think 5G is just "OMG DEEZ SPEEDZ!"
Republican irony is a delicious breakfast (Score:2, Insightful)
The modern Republican Party has become all about benefiting single companies and their wealthy investors over the common good of society. I guess this is only a problem when it conflicts with another wealthy Republican donor - defense conglomerates.
Re:Republican irony is a delicious breakfast (Score:5, Informative)
Someone always has to try to make this partisan (Score:4, Insightful)
So the original waiver was granted under Obama's FCC, then suspended, then granted again under Trumps' FCC. The political machinations going on are party-agnostic.
This seems like a trivial issue to resolve. Ligado claims they can keep their signals from interfering with GPS. So have them put their money where their mouth is. Grant the waiver and let them build out their network. But under the condition that if contrary to their assurances it DOES interfere with GPS, then the waiver will be rescinded without compensation. They have to tear down their network and take a loss on the cost of all the equipment they built if their original assurance turns out to be false.
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Ligado claims they can keep their signals from interfering with GPS.
I think this gets to the heart of the issue. The military isn't just concerned with 5G accidentally interfering with GPS, but also with an attacker using COTS hardware to jam GPS. So if the 5G radios naturally interfere with GPS, but are constrained in some manner to limit the problem, but an attacker can just remove that constraint and have a functioning GPS jammer, the military objects to that.
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GPS is a very, very weak signal at 1525.42MHz and 1227.60MHz. Not exactly hard to jam. Spoofing it is a lot more difficult. Simply jamming though? Oscillator, amplifier, antenna, done. Components at those frequencies are not difficult to obtain.
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Pai is a toad owned by the telecom companies, not a party affiliate. He should have a (V) for Verizon after his name, not an (R). He always decides 100% for his toad masters no matter what the issue is. There are corporate toads in both parties and their loyalty to their corporate masters always exceeds any party affiliation. BTW, Pai was appointed by Obama not Trump. Trump simply inherited him and the a Republican taking the White House made him into FCC chairman. Pai can not be fired until 2022, he has
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Your statements are misleading. Obama did not appoint him as FCC Chairman. Only as one of the five FCC commissioners.
Trump appointed him Chair of FCC, and Trump owns all the bad decisions Ajit Fucking Pay makes.
He also does not have a 10 year term. He has a 5 year term, and while he cannot be fired, he can be demoted, and another commissioner be promoted to chair (with congress's approval).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Military knows best (Score:2)
Many RF devices are capable of producing stronger signals than what a single country might approve and regulations are quite frequently implemented in software (i.e the firmware). It is wise to test for interference at higher power levels, because malware could otherwise trigger a wide blackout of GPS signals by intentionally increasing devices' power levels beyond what the FCC thinks should or shouldn't be allowed. FCC is short-sighted.
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I remember during the 1970's CB radio craze folks used a "silver resistor" bypass of the current limiter in the output stage boosting the power way up. The FCC reacted by requiring manufacturers use transistors that could not dissipate more than (I think) 3 watts. This is the type of fix that might be applicable today.
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The problem for the military still remains though. When a regulation is cheap to bypass, i.e. by replacing a transistor or by changing software, then you want to make sure it's not going to get used against you. I don't expect the FCC to do the military's job, but they shouldn't act like they had it all figured out and it's the military who is creating a drama here. It is disrespectful and I hope they choke the next time they thank veterans for their service.
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They'd allow you 5 watts. Same as the first gen cell (bag) phones. It wasn't hard to find the diagram to boost it up. I always kept mine legal. My Nephew cranked his way up. I think he was running 300 watts. It wasn't long before the FCC found him and sent him a big old fine.
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How come the conspiracy always think this stuff does something bad? Why is there no one saying 5G gives us bigger penises and vaccines give us a thicker fuller head of hair?
Re:What does it cause again? (Score:4, Funny)
How come the conspiracy always think this stuff does something bad? Why is there no one saying 5G gives us bigger penises and vaccines give us a thicker fuller head of hair?
Because people who start them are negative and want you to think as they do, meaning, they want you to think negative, too.
By the way, why do you believe a bigger penis and more hair is always good? Do you plan to have sex with a woolly mammoth?
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Damn, I wish I hadn't commented so that I had mod points for you :)
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You see, if the 5G gave you bigger penises and fuller heads of hair, people would have more sex. If people have more sex, there will be more babies. If there's more babies, that's more subjects that need to have the control and monitoring chips implanted. And they need time to build up the facilities and train/brainwash the staff.
It's so obvious, man, you must be willfully ignoring THE TRUTH.
Re: What does it cause again? (Score:1)
It's because they're bald with small penises and want someone/something to blame. The other people who might believe in this stuff are too busy having awesome sex with lots of people because of their great heads of hair...
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Don't worry, the latest conspiracy theory is that 5G gives you coronavirus sympthoms and is the thing actually killing people right now. So no need to worry about autism.
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> Seriously, it's the FCC's job to figure out how to use spectrum.
That's the job that Congress gave them - figure out the details of exactly how to use in accordance with rhe law passed by Congress. FCC of course doesn't have the power to make laws about spectrum use or anything else - passing laws is the job of Congress. I don't have a problem with Congress exercising some oversight, checking that the FCC they created to enforce the laws Congress passed actually is doing that job.
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In this conflict between this FCC and the military, I trust the military. OTOH, it's hard to think of where I would trust this FCC.
What's the problem? (Score:3)
Can't they just drone-strike the FCC? Works everywhere else in the world.
missiles that first knock on the door before enter (Score:2)
What's the frequency? (Score:3)
I've seen so many articles about this, and I can't figure out what frequency and power ranges they are talking about.
GPS is 1.2 and 1.5Ghz.
5G supports quite a range, with the low brands being 3.3 to 4.2 Ghz, and the upper bands being 400Mhz bands between 24Ghz and 300Ghz.
4G transmissions are in the 700Mhz to 900Mhz range.
So what specific frequencies is the FCC granting license for, and what frequency is the DoD asking them to not use, and what are the power ranges?
Re:What's the frequency? (Score:4, Informative)
GPS (and Glonass) are 1559 MHz - 1610 MHz [rntfnd.org]. The problem is bandpass filters are not perfect, so there's always some spillover outside the frequencies your equipment is designed to broadcast at.
Ligado (formerly Lightspeed) bought the bandwidth for cheap because nobody else wanted it - everyone assumed its use would be severely restricted due to its proximity to GPS. Since then, they've been trying to get FCC authorization to use it for terrestrial communications. Radio equipment is always improving, so past denials on the basis of it interfering with GPS can always be challenged a few years later as newer equipment capable of better filtering becomes available.
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Ligado will interfere more because of the power difference. Compare the red in the graph -vs- the Glonass signal power in green.
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Emphasis mine. That's the big part -
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Thanks, that's a great link. I'm frustrated that most of the Slashdot discussion was politics rather than this.
Meanwhile .. (Score:2)
Outside the USA 5G uses slightly different frequencies and so will not interfere with GPS ...
Why is this even a thing? (Score:1)
I don't understand why this persists. They know how to figure out if this is a problem or not. They could do it 30 years ago, why not now?
I remember reading in the IEEE Spectrum decades ago about frequencies and interactions.
If there really is a kill switch if there is a problem, that's a HELL of a risk for the investors. All that money would go up in smoke. They'd better make sure there isn't a problem.
Not surprising! (Score:1)
Ajit Pai is a fucking idiot!