With a mission to revolutionize the U.S. wireless industry, LightSquared created the first-ever, wholesale-only nationwide 4G-LTE (News - Alert) network integrated with satellite coverage. It has been offering mobile satellite voice and data services to North America over its MSAT-1 and MSAT-2 satellites.

In November 2010, LightSquared launched SkyTerra (News - Alert) 1 satellite network to provide reliable, ubiquitous coverage primarily for public safety, security, fleet management and asset tracking.

Recently, LightSquared (News - Alert) announced via a press release that it is further extending the emulation phase of its current generation voice (MSAT), private network carrier and mobile data services over its new SkyTerra-1 satellite network through the end of 2015.

Officials with LightSquared confirmed that the company will continue to evaluate extending its current generation services beyond 2015 as it works to finalize its plans for launching next generation satellite services. In addition, the current regulatory events will not affect company's satellite services and both MSAT 1 and MSAT 2 satellites will remain in service and are available to provide critical redundancy capabilities.

Bryan Hartin (News - Alert), vice president of sales, distribution and business development for LightSquared, said in a statement, “LightSquared's mission is to support every user through the emulation period and transition them to a next generation LightSquared satellite platform…Our existing satellite customers will not see any change in service or coverage as a result of recent regulatory events.”

Currently supporting the majority of LightSquared's satellite customers, the service on SkyTerra-1 will emulate existing satellite services, such as all LightSquared features such as push-to-talk. It is also compatible with all of the company's current devices.

The latest extension of current generation services ensures that public safety officials and first responders have ubiquitous access to communications during emergencies.

Apart from that, public safety officials and first responders and enterprise customers from a variety of industries including transportation, oil, natural gas, maritime, utilities and telecommunications can also benefit from the extension of current generation service.

The extension is also beneficial for those industries that have thousands of workers in remote areas who depend on satellite communications for their jobs and their safety.

Hartin continued, “LightSquared's next generation customers will be able to take advantage of the SkyTerra-1 advanced spot beam coverage capability to utilize the LightSquared L-Band spectrum more efficiently, resulting in significantly reduced device size and cost.”