Questions Surround Globalstar's Plans for Stripped-Back TLPS
Globalstar's revised terrestrial low-power service plans netted the company FCC approval (see 1612230060), but they might have left the company with few options for deploying in the spectrum, experts tell us. "All sorts of things have been cut away to get an approval, so the question is, how do you use this and what value?" said satellite industry consultant Tim Farrar. Globalstar didn't comment, and said it would address use case issues in a call with investors Friday. In its revised application in November, the company didn't discuss specific use cases. Approval would "support high data rates, provide a diversity of customers and locations with additional terrestrial broadband capacity, and help satisfy consumers’ demand for wireless broadband," said the satellite firm.
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When Globalstar's TLPS plans were for it to act as a Wi-Fi channel, possible interested parties included cable companies, while potential applications included integrated Wi-Fi and cellular calling, Farrar said. The FCC approval for just a nonstandard low-powered channel, with Globalstar having dropped its request to also use 10.5 MHz of adjacent unlicensed spectrum, seems to greatly limit the use cases to perhaps IoT, though that doesn't seem particularly lucrative, Farrar said.
The most likely use for the company's 11.5 MHz of mobile licensed spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band is probably as supplemental downlink spectrum for a carrier LTE network, though there's a question of the viability of supporting that band in handsets, said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America. While 11.5 MHz by itself "in theory is very valuable," it may not be harmonized in a sufficient number of countries to be included in a device, he said. New America lobbied the FCC for approval of Globalstar's original proposal with a condition the company allow opportunistic access to Wi-Fi channel 14 when the firm wasn't using it (see 1603250042 and 1606140020). One hiccup to using the 11.5 MHz as a supplemental downlink is that it's not paired or a particularly wide channel, when LTE Advanced, for example, is looking to use 20 MHz channels, Calabrese said.
Since Sprint has adjacent spectrum, the Globalstar spectrum might be more valuable to it than any other carrier, Calabrese said. But Sprint might be more in the market to sell or lease spectrum than acquire more, he said. Sprint didn't comment. The carrier backed Globalstar's stripped-back TLPS plans (see 1611170033).
The revised Globalstar approval maintains the same low-power and out-of-band emission (OOBE) limits that apply to Wi-Fi, so the company has less flexibility than some other companies, such as Dish, received in terrestrial waivers for using mobile satellite spectrum for LTE, said one spectrum expert. Those low-power limits seem to limit use of the 11.5 MHz for small cell spectrum such as 5G, the expert said.
The FCC order gives Globalstar "nice, clean spectrum with which to deploy TLPS" by shutting the door on opportunistic use for unlicensed service, Morgan Lewis said in a regulatory update to clients last week. It also said the OOBE limits the FCC set are relaxed enough that Globalstar partners should easily be able to engineer devices or use off-the-shelf RF filters.