Open Mobile Summit: LightSquared CEO walks thin line warning of 'spectrum crunch'

San Francisco – At the Open Mobile Summit here, LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja tried to link his roiled-in-controversy would-be LTE wholesaler with all things positive: openness, technology democratization, innovation, economic development and more.

To paint LightSquared in the friendliest of terms, he even went so far as to color its network as a “dumb pipe,” out of step with industry worries concerning that phrase, but in line with efforts to make LightSquared as unthreatening as possible.

“We want to be the dumbest wireless broadband pipe. We want no intelligence inside our network, none, zero….we are an absolute utility,” Ahuja said, noting that LightSquared will depend on partners from device makers to app developers to virtual network operators and others to add value to the mobile broadband network it delivers. “Connectivity is a utility. The [integrated network and service] model that exists, this is the opportunity to disrupt it,” he said.

According to Ahuja, the additional mobile broadband capacity LightSquared can provide – on a wholesale basis to all comers—can help relieve what he claimed what is not only a looming spectrum shortage, but a capacity shortfall as well.

“[The industry is] on track to run out of network capacity over the next two to three years. We are at a very critical tipping point and we as a nation are just not ready to deal with it,” he claimed, adding that economic growth, industry innovation and even job creation are all at stake.

Whether or not LightSquared will ultimately emerge as the force for good it contends, it first must deal with concerns that its LTE services interfere with GPS devices, an ongoing firestorm despite LightSquared proposals to alleviate the problem (CP: LightSquared, GPS industry spar over proposed interference fix).

Indeed, in the latest flare-up last week, the GPS industry claims that rather than help relieve the spectrum crunch, LightSquared has basically gotten its spectrum for free, building a mobile broadband wireless network that would cost other operators billions of dollars in licenses (CP: LightSquared is jilting taxpayers out of billions, GPS industry claims). Sure, the argument goes, LightSquared may help deliver mobile broadband services in a spectrum-constrained environment; but it’s doing so in a way that shorts the government coffers and puts a big bill for radio fixes on the GPS industry – and, once again, the government.

“All in all, LightSquared’s proposal represents a new low in financial engineering at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer,” the Coalition’s statement last week said. “Never before has a single company tried to gain so much from our national spectrum resources and pay so little for the collateral damage caused by its plans.”

During a Q&A session on stage, LightSquared’s Ahuja – a telecom veteran including a high-profile stint as CEO of Orange – said he believed technology, not politics, would resolve any issues with its network.

“For decades, the history of [the mobile] industry is one where we’ve dealt with [network] interference, and we’ve dealt with it through innovation, not politics,” he said. “This is my first experience dealing with interference with politics.”

According to his argument, even as LightSquared’s network and service plans had been approved by the FCC years ago, “the [GPS] devices built over the last decade did not accommodate the fact that [they were going to run up against] an approved network,” he said. Even with that, LightSquared has proposed several solutions to the GPS interference problem, he noted, “and we are confident we will solve it.”