Ligado Networks has entered into a cooperation agreement with Topcon Positioning Systems, which it called an “important development” toward building its proposed 5G network. As part of the agreement, Topcon has filed a letter with the FCC urging approval of Ligado’s proposal to modify its spectrum licenses to enable ground-based services on its mid-band spectrum.
“After months of testing, analysis and discussion, we are pleased to have reached a resolution with Topcon that provides a path forward for Ligado and ensures protection of all Topcon GNSS devices,” Ligado Networks CEO Doug Smith said in a statement. “This agreement underscores our ongoing commitment to working collaboratively with companies to find solutions and is further evidence that our planned satellite and ground-based network can peacefully co-exist alongside our spectrum neighbors.”
The agreement with Topcon, a manufacturer of high-precision GNSS devices, marks a significant milestone and a step forward in the process to resolve differences among GNSS device manufacturers over Ligado’s proposed use of spectrum for ground-based wireless services in the L-Band. This is the fifth co-existence agreement between Ligado and a major manufacturer. Ligado has also entered into agreements with Deere & Company, Garmin International Inc., Trimble Navigation Limited, and NovAtel Inc. over the past year.
As in the other arrangements, a key tenet of the agreement with Topcon requires the parties to coordinate on operating parameters and deployment plans as Ligado rolls out its terrestrial network, Ligado said.
Altair Semiconductor, a provider of LTE chipsets, announced its ALT1160 LTE CAT-1 Chipset has successfully completed interoperability testing with the Open Mobile Alliance’s Lightweight M2M (LwM2M) protocol. The test took place at the recent OMA TestFest, where vendors had the opportunity to test the stability of their LwM2M implementations in a multi-vendor environment, while helping to ensure the quality of OMA specifications.
At TestFest, Altair’s chipset interoperated successfully with all participating LwM2M Servers, including Ericsson, Bosch Software Innovations, Nokia, ETRI, IOTEROP, and AVSystem, and passed all tests as defined by OMA.
Appthority, a provider of enterprise mobile threat protection, this week published research that found only three percent of the top iOS apps installed on enterprise devices worldwide are already using security specifications in Apple’s App Transport Security (ATS) data encryption requirements, which are due to go into effect on January 1, 2017. Existing apps that don’t comply with the ATS mandate won’t be removed from the App Store, Appthority said, but new apps and updates to existing apps must implement ATS by January 1 in order to be approved for inclusion.
“Although Apple’s ATS encryption requirements go into effect in just a few weeks, Appthority researchers found that the majority of apps in the enterprise don’t fully utilize the best practices encryption standard, which should be a concern to enterprises,” Appthority Vice President of Engineering Robbie Forkish said. “The new ATS mandate only applies to new submissions to the App Store, and Apple will be allowing exceptions to ATS, so, while the requirement should strengthen data security there will still be iOS apps not using data encryption in enterprise environments, even after January 1. For this reason, it’s incredibly important that businesses have visibility into, and management of, the risks related to apps with these exceptions, as they can put enterprise data at risk.”
Additional findings from Appthority’s report include:
•More than half of apps (55 percent) allow use of HTTP, instead of requiring HTTPS
•83 percent of apps had ATS disabled for all network connections
•26 percent of apps had ATS disabled at a global level, with specific exceptions set up for domains
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0, Infrastructure