• Bill Flook
• Reporter
• Email: bflook@bizjournals.com

Embattled wireless startup LightSquared said Thursday it has enlisted former North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan and other retired lawmakers as part of an outreach campaign to rural America.

Dorgan, along with former Reps. Charles Stenholm of Texas and George Nethercutt of Washington, have joined the Reston company’s new “Empower Rural America” initiative, which will look to smooth the deployment of the planned service in towns and communities underserved by wireless broadband coverage.

The timing and focus of the announcement are no coincidence. Some of LightSquared biggest potential benefits and most powerful foes are found in the rural stretches of the country.

LightSquared, backed by New York billionaire Philip Falcone, is building out a next-gen wireless network through a combination of two satellites and thousands of terrestrial base stations, and plans to sell coverage wholesale to big-box retailers and other wireless carriers. But the company is locked in a bitter and escalating battle with the global positioning system (GPS) industry, especially precision agriculture GPS users like John Deere, after rounds of tests showed that powerful transmissions from LightSquared’s earth-bound stations blacked out nearby GPS service.

Much of the country heard of the 4G wireless venture for the first time in the context of the war with GPS users and manufacturers. LightSquared, clearly frustrated by being portrayed as the villain, has a lot of work to do to counteract the negative headlines.

Essentially, LightSquared wants to convince rural communities of the benefits of adding another player in a wireless market now dominated by a few gigantic carriers, who have a history of providing shoddy broadband coverage outside of major urban and suburban population centers. But the whole operation is a non-starter if it can’t resolve the GPS interference issue (which it’s trying to do through a set of compromises) and receive a final go-ahead from federal regulators. Today’s announcement demonstrates that LightSquared believes that battle will be fought in Washington state as much as it will in Washington, D.C.