At Thursday’s Telecom Council’s TC3 Conference, upstart wireless wholesaler LIghtSquared announced the opening of a “Sandbox” or innovation center for 3rd party developers.  Located in Mt View, CA, the Sandbox is being hosted by Nokia Siemens Networks, one of LightSquared’s wireless infrastructure vendors.

This new “playground for developers” was said to be the first to offer three types of radio technologies:

• Proximal (NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi),
• Terrestial (2G, 3G, LTE) and
• Satellite based radio

LightSquared is seeking 3rd party software, hardware, and applications for its combined terrestial- satellite 4G-LTE network. The Sandbox team, led by Moe Motamedi, is looking for innovative solutions in any of the following areas: VoIP, video streaming, multi-player gaming, digital advertising, security, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Smart Grid, M2M communications,telematics, Location Based Services (LBS), mobile health/ telemedicine, cloud server virtualization.

Start-ups, entrepreneurs and other interested parties are invited to test and optimize their solutions for these (and possibly other areas) on LightSquared’s terrestial and satellite network. The proximal wireless technologies are also available for testing of technologies in this Sandbox. LightSquared would like to aggregate APIs from several device companies and make them available to developers of mobile apps and other software that leverage its network.

For more information, please visit: http://www.lightsquared.com/what-we-do/applications-and-services/

Contact: [email protected]

Backgrounder:

On July 28, 2011, LightSquared agreed to pay Sprint $9 billion to build a 4G-LTE network using its L-Band spectrum. That terrestial network will use Sprint’s cell towers and nex-gen, multi-mode Base Stations to be deployed in its “Network Vision” plan. LightSquared also will be able to fallback to Sprint’s EVDO based 3G network in areas where terrestial LTE is not available.  (We wonder how roaming/ handoff will work between satellite-LTE, terrestial-LTE, and terrestial-3G?  And how will it be decided to roam to 3G or satellite based LTE when terrestial LTE isn’t available?).

LightSquared plans to wholesale the combined 4G/3G terrestial network (built and maintained by Sprint) along with its own LTE satellite network.  However, U.S. Federal regulators are hesitant to allow LightSquared to use its satellite-based spectrum, because of claims it interferes with GPS frequencies.  

Proposed tour of Sandbox Facility:

IEEE ComSocSCV is talking with LightSquared management to arrange a tour of their Mt View Sandbox for interested hardware and software developers.  Please contact this author if interested:  [email protected].

References:

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2011/07/29/is-it-lights-out-for-lightsquared-faa-says-revised-plan-to-mitigate-gps-interference-not-good-enough

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2011/03/28/lightsquared-in-contract-talks-aims-to-be-king-of-wireless-wholesale-networks-in-u-s

http://www.lightsquared.com/press-room/press-releases/sprint-nextel-and-lightsquared-announce-spectrum-hosting-and-network-services-agreement/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/lightsquared-sprint-strike-partnership-but-questions-loom/2011/07/28/gIQAHvuleI_blog.html

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2011/08/25/sprint-will-not-abandon-wimax-customers-or-clearwire-after-deploying-lte-but-no-plans-for-4g-apis

http://viodi.com/2011/08/26/fcc-restarts-180-day-clock-on-att-t-mobile-merger-cutting-through-all-the-hype/comment-page-1/

http://wimaxcommunity.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sprint-can-support-both-lte

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2011/09/06/what-next-for-sprint-if-att-get-done-4g-strategy-will-be-key