Here is the money quote:

What NextNav did include however is its intent to resell their exclusive bandwidth access to mobile 5G networks.

They admit nobody is calling for ground based GPS. And that can be done in lots of ways and on spectrum already allocated as the EFF says in their piece.

Fact is 5G sucks for some use cases, like indoors. And they could fall back to 4G and or do other things to improve on that.

Trying to mooch the 900Mhz spectrum away from an active public use, just to resell their shiny new resource to 5G companies looking for easy options is not in the beat public interest.

I think they are doing it this way to avoid ugly PR for already disliked wireless companies. But I could be wrong...

900Mhz is excellent and widely used too. Augmenting 5G would make whoever stole it from all of us a lot of money.

The great propagation properties are exactly why public use of 900Mhz is popular!

I say the 5G companies already have 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G spectrum and the lower frequency ones propagate better in diverse terrain anyway.

All this means 5G companies have options and there is no need to allow one company to own what is now a public resource serving the public well just as it is supposed to.

We do need a land based GPS alternative. The consequences of losing GPS without a ground based backup in place are almost incalculable.

Clearly it doesn't need to be at 902-928 Mhz.

[Edit/Brainstorming]

I suggest we implement a 0.1% (time) tax on digital RF transmissions of all types, I.E. every second UTC, all Fixed Position transmitters send a 1 millisecond "National Positioning System" packet, with position and delay data with precision timing on all packetized systems using the public airwaves. We could use same system to distribute time signals.

This allows implementation of a new public service with minimal cost to all concerned, and we don't have to steal anyone's bandwidth from other services.

You know, if someone were actually interested in doing a modern terrestrial navigation system, I think the DME band would be where to go. It's 962-1213Mhz, a whopping 250Mhz of super prime spectrum. Lots of DMEs are now being decommissioned, so it shouldn't need as much spectrum as it has. Now, there are some other things in that band like radars and such, but I'd bet there's at least 30Mhz or so that you could set aside for a more modern ground based navigation system.

How common is enforcement in these situations? What happens if a 900MHz baby monitor continues to be used after this chunk of the spectrum is privatized?

It seems like there is an asymmetry, we need a way to allocate this pre-existing 'unlicensed' spectrum explicitly for public use... and 900MHz is def a sweet spot. It shouldn't even make sense to attempt to reallocate it. The public ownership should be immutable.

This is just terrible and I’m grateful the EFF keeps an eye on these rent seekers. How can we stop this?