The military vehemently opposed this idea, and assumed it would be denied based on various objections that they, and many others, including NASA and Garmin, raised against it. And it isn't supposition. They ran tests that proved the danger to GPS is real. The FCC did in fact take action to revoke LightSquared's temporary approval back in 2012 (this has been going on for years). They also attached new conditions to any eventual approval that required LightSquared (now Ligado) to prove non-interference before such approval could be granted. They required Ligado to use frequency 'buffers' away from those closest to the frequencies used by GPS, and about 99.3% less power than what they had planned in their 2015 proposal.
The controversy here isn't 5G by the way. The limitations and dangers have nothing to do with 5G. The media just uses 5G as a convenient moniker. The problem is the portion of the L band Ligado plans to use on their satellites to build their 5G network. It's very close to the frequencies used by GPS satellites, it's higher power, and it's fairly common to see bleed over on closely adjacent frequencies. Many GPS receivers on earth could easily be overwhelmed by a higher power signal on such a close frequency. Very few GPS receivers are hardened against such a possibility, which is why concerns have been raised about GPS jamming by adversaries in a military conflict. But this frequency band isn't required for 5G, so the implementation of 5G isn't the issue. Many companies like Verizon and AT&T are rolling out 5G on other frequencies that aren't a danger to GPS.
This also isn't a new issue. The FCC approval was back in April, 2020, and legislation was created to stop this effort last year as well. This particular bill takes a new tack, which AVweb found noteworthy, so they reported on again. It isn't an attempt to revoke the approval, but rather a way to make Ligado responsible for the potential consequences rather than something getting mired down in endless government agency bureaucracy at the FCC. But given our incredibly litigious society these days, I suspect any attempt to make Ligado pay for damage would be similarly mired down in our court system.
But in a nutshell, it appears the FCC is confident the restrictions they required are enough to mitigate the problem, although obviously many others are not. As is common in Washington, there's also accusations of undue political influence. It's certainly happened before, and it's happened at the FCC several times. They've had to reverse approvals before after they were found to be more politically motivated rather than technologically practical. They also have to be mindful of a great many different parties potentially affected by their decisions, and sometimes they only discover those parties and damages after the fact. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. Like most Americans, we're just along for the ride and will have to wait and see what happens.
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