On The Fence

LightSquared, GPS on collision course - Washington Times

“Good fences make good neighbors.” No matter how well you get along with the neighbor next door, it’s good to know where his property ends, and yours begins.

And good fences are essential for more than just real estate; other areas of the law depend on laying down clear, enforceable boundaries between one company’s intangible “property line” and another’s. Perhaps the best example of this is the communications spectrum. For more than 80 years, the Federal Communications Commission (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission) has fixed the boundaries between users’ respective shares of the spectrum, and policed the spectrum to ensure that the users have obeyed those “fences.”

Spectrum allocation is by and large a low-key issue. But in recent months, one dispute among users of adjacent spectrum space has become particularly heated.