A Tech-Neutral Approach for Commercial Position, Navigation, and Timing
From global financial transactions to food delivery, accessible and reliable Global Positioning System (GPS) services are crucial. While understanding exactly how GPS technologies work is not known by many, it is certainly widely used with the expectations of accuracy using Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) information. GPS has today become an invisible backbone of the economy, as an outage could cost the U.S. over a billion dollars a day and disrupt our daily lives.
Until recently, GPS services have been government led but with the rise of commercial satellite constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO) there are new PNT capabilities from space. In response to this, the Federal Communications Commission put out a Notice of Inquiry on “Promoting the Development of PNT Solutions,” signaling the potential future of these services. Additionally, the Space Force is looking for stakeholder feedback to enable a robust PNT environment.
One benefit of utilizing commercial PNT services is that devices that can access multiple signals from different satellites can be more resilient to jamming and less susceptible to environmental signal loss. Commercial satellites in LEO can also provide more powerful signals than the higher altitude GPS satellites. Some companies are launching satellites dedicated to PNT services, which could be attractive to services who need a secure source of PNT data with centimeter-level accuracy. For example, this would enable first responders to locate people in need of rescue and access emergency systems in dangerous environments, shipping and logistics firms to track individual packages within shipping containers, and engineering firms to build complex structures such as bridges and skyscrapers at a higher level of detail.
For more general use consumers, telecommunications satellites can help deliver PNT services through their existing 5G and broadband signals. This would be especially beneficial for users with smartphones or other 5G enabled devices, as they would be able to access high-quality PNT data without any special modifications to their devices.
No commercial services is a one-size-fits-all solution, rather they are a system-of-systems that can be deployed for specific use cases. A cellphone uses a mix of signals from GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell towers along with internal sensors to determine the device’s position and proximity to connected devices. The use of terrestrial PNT systems, such as 5G-enabled networks, are particularly useful in urban environments where the density of buildings can block or bounce signals from GPS satellites. Cars have a variety of sensors that determine positioning as a safety tool (such as backup sensors and blind spot warning systems), and autonomous vehicles use even more sophisticated systems to operate without any driver input. In each of these examples, the commercial PNT services are able to address a wide range of unique challenges that a customer or consumer might face.
Commercial systems are also not aiming to fully replace GPS as the primary PNT system either, rather they are each able to augment the existing GPS services in different ways. This is in large part due to the fact that GPS is still the gold standard for delivering data on geodesy, which is the science of measuring the exact position of the Earth in space and time. While some of these systems can operate as temporary backups in the case of a GPS system failure, without the geodesic calibration from GPS signals these systems will eventually lose their accuracy.
The U.S. government must take action to ensure that PNT services are able to fully meet their potential. This can be achieved by providing access to secure spectrum, which can be a major hurdle to providing adequate services. Additionally, regulators can streamline regulatory processes and minimize requirements on operators to enable a faster pace of innovation while maintaining a basic level of safety and freedom from harmful interference.
On the funding side, any developmental grants or service contracts should be considered on a technology-neutral basis to ensure the best possible service for specific use-cases. The federal government should continue to support geodesic infrastructure and maintain coordination with international PNT providers, such as the EU’s Galileo and China’s BeiDou, to enable a global, interconnected PNT network.
While there will always be a need for GPS to exist as a public service, commercial PNT technologies have proven to be highly effective in augmenting GPS services. By supporting a tech-neutral, system-of-systems approach, the federal government can enable a more resilient and more accessible PNT network that can meet the diverse needs of the modern economy.
