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Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of wireless start-up LightSquared, is pulling a Joe Namath and guaranteeing a victory for the venture and its troubled financial backer, hedge-fund honcho Phil Falcone.
“I am absolutely confident the FCC will approve it,” Ahuja said in an interview with The Post this week, referring to the pending FCC vote on the firm’s business plan. “Absolutely, it is going to happen.”
Those are strong words considering the tidal wave of objections that have been lobbed at LightSquared since January, when the FCC provided a waiver for the venture to build its dual satellite and land-based broadband 4G network. To provide lower pricing, the company asked for the waiver to allow some of its clients to use just the land-based towers.
But industries that rely on precision GPS signals, including the US military and tractor maker John Deere, have kicked up a firestorm of protest over claims that LightSquared’s frequencies interfere with their navigation devices.
The debate has grown so intense that lawmakers have intervened, with some decrying the FCC’s waiver as White House cronyism and demanding the plan be trashed.
Despite the obstacles, Ahuja — just as New York Jets Hall of Famer Namath did in the run-up to Super Bowl III against the heavily favored Baltimore Colts — is predicting victory. He says failure is not an option. During an hour-and-a-half interview with The Post, he waved off questions about the company’s game plan if the GPS issue becomes insurmountable.
As a scientist, he says he believes the problems can be solved with technology, just as he previously did while wiring up both the Paris and London subways.
“We think we will overcome this challenge by simply good engineering,” he said. “These are engineering challenges that good engineers can work and resolve,” he said.
But it’s also become clear that the former CEO of a France Telecom unit has recently shifted his strategy and is taking his fight to the American consumer through full-page ads in newspapers and interviews like this one.
During the interview, for example, he struck a populist theme, saying wireless bills could be slashed by as much as 50 percent.
The FCC vote is expected later this year. By Nov. 30, regulators will complete interference tests on LightSquared’s frequencies.
In an attempt to reach a compromise with critics, the company has said it will move its frequency to the lower band of the spectrum. That will eliminate 99.5 percent of the problem, it said.
Last week, LightSquared said it will spend $150 million to help retrofit existing GPS gadgets. That will fix the remaining 0.5 percent of the interference problem.
If successful in gaining FCC approval, LightSquared plans to sell wholesale 4G service to companies, including Best Buy, which could then sell phones and other devices to individual customers.
