"I don't think the FCC is going to rush to do anything," said Maury Mechanick, an attorney at White & Case and a former executive of satellite provider Comsat. The agency is out of public eye for now on this case, and as soon as it makes a decision, it will be thrust back into the limelight, he said. Mechanick believes it is likely that LightSquared would sue if the agency shot down its network. The carrier's recent suggests he may be right.

The FCC's options are limited, according to Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. The conditional waiver it gave LightSquared, to let it sell LTE apart from satellite service, required the carrier to prove it wouldn't interfere with GPS.

"That condition has not been met, so I don't know that the commission really has a choice here," Pace said. It's also not clear that the FCC could give LightSquared another spectrum block except as part of a larger rulemaking process, he said. Whatever it may do, the timing of the next step is open-ended, he said. "They are an independent regulatory agency, and they will pick and choose their time."

The IDG News Service