Report estimates cost of disruption to GPS in UK would be £1bn per day The UK stands to lose £1bn per day in the event of a major disruption to the Global Positioning System (GPS), according to a government report. Emergency services would also be severely affected and struggle to cope with demand. Longer emergency calls, less efficient dispatch, navigation, and congested roads would mean a total …
oh wait, post-Brexit the UK will now have to negotiate, and pay for access to it
They could also use GLONASS (as many phones have for years,) and from 2020 most will probably also have the hardware for Beidou 2. For civil use they'd just use the system any licence is paid on hardware.
But planning against the loss of a single sat nav system is a big bit stupid. If the GPS sats are clobbered by a Carrington event, then so will all other sats be. Same with some unexpectedly calamitous space debris or meteorite shower event, or even tit-for-tax satellite shoot downs. So preparing a Plan B needs to assume that satellite coverage is simply unavailable.
Another commentard has made the point about the use of wifi and phone triangulation or mast-location, and that's not so accurate, but I suspect that combining that with inertial navigation to fill in the gaps would be an acceptable alternative. If it were a Carrington event, then there is a problem that the ground and mobile telephony or power systems might have a few other things to worry about.
Maybe, just maybe, we'd have to cope without it? Hipsters and milennials would be dead in days, unable to find convenience stores or craft coffee shops. Those of us able to read a map might survive a lot longer.
@winger, if you read the article you'd know there are issues with docking large ships (cause oil tankers crashing in their dock is no big deal) and aumblance drivers not being able to make it to where they are needed as quickly as possible. We could do without just as we could do without other benefits of technology but that doesn't mean it will be a pleasent experience.
if you read the article you'd know there are issues with docking large ships
@James51: We've had manually controlled supertankers for many decades. The idea that lack of GPS would be an insurmountable problem is nonsense. You're also overlooking the fact that reliable accuracy of GPS is about 4m. If you were relying on that sort of accuracy to berth a large vessel, you'll find that rather too often the gangplank and cranes don't reach, or that you've wiped a hole twenty five feet deep in the side of the vessel.
"aumblance drivers not being able to make it to where they are needed as quickly as possible."
Erm. No.
Lack of GPS is NOT the reason why ambulance drivers would not be able to make it ASAP.
There are two primary reasons (in order of importance) :
(a) I met someone working on the pointy end of the NHS (not a paramedic, but near enough) in a large city (not London).
"Red 1" calls (most serious) have a target response time of 8 minutes to site.
Number of times "someone" recalled reaching site in 8 minutes ? Zero (or near enough).
Main reason why ? The realities of traffic in a city ... flashing blue lights and lots of noise only get you so far !
Corbynistas may well tell you that this would all be fixed under Labour who would throw yet more money at the NHS. But the reality is it would not. It takes a long time (and quite a bit of money) to train up a paremedic, and that's before extra time spent training your newly trained paramedic how to drive on blues. Add to that, the cost of buying, equipping and maintaining additional ambulances.
(b) The satnav system the NHS use is far from the pinnacle of perfection. I have witnessed, on more than one occasion, an ambulance reaching the destination street and screaming down to one end of a road, only for the crew to realise they found themselves at the wrong end ... cue a u-turn and return back to the right spot.
In summary:
The reality is that you are always going to have a finite level of paramedics and a finite level of ambulances, no matter who is in government.
Hence the reason why everyone should know how to do CPR and everyone should be able to use an AED (and have one nearby). Because to have the best chance of positive outcome, an AED shold be on that chest within 4 minutes max .... no ambulance is going to be with you in 4 minutes unless you live or work next door !
The same goes for recognising stroke. The more people trained in recognition, the faster the ambulance gets called, the greater the chance of meeting the golden hour !
Same could be said for a variety of other emergencies. If you haven't done at least the basic one-day training, go do so NOW !
"Main reason why ? The realities of traffic in a city ... flashing blue lights and lots of noise only get you so far"
If you have enough people you can distribute them more densely. In 2002 I could almost guarantee that response time - with an HGV not a car - across all of Devon and Cornwall. Cuts and closure of stations has increased that now.
"extra time spent training your newly trained paramedic how to drive on blues."
Two week course.
"The satnav system the NHS use is far from the pinnacle of perfection"
It's a damn site better than the dog-eared map book that the Police get issued with.
"finite level of paramedics and a finite level of ambulances,"
Yes, but you only need a few more to give excellent coverage. And more sensible use of resources (none of this "protecting the front line" that means the front line spends 80% of the time away from the front line doing admin). There is a truly awful story of Ambulance service politics that I can't tell. Hopefully once the coroner has ruled it'll be public.
While you've addressed the issues raised, none of them are at all relevant - nobody will be calling ambulance, police or any other emergency services unless they physically turn up and knock on the station door.
The timing signals needed to make a digital 'phone network function are derived from and synchronised by GPS units - without them the network will degrade to a non-functioning noise generation device.
[quote]The timing signals needed to make a digital 'phone network function are derived from and synchronised by GPS units - without them the network will degrade to a non-functioning noise generation device.[/quote]
It's ALREADY non-functioning. The nearest my 'phone can get to the right time is about five minutes.
[quote]The same goes for recognising stroke. The more people trained in recognition, the faster the ambulance gets called, the greater the chance of meeting the golden hour ![/quote]
Yeah, right.
My sister's friend had a brain aneurism.
The ambulance + paramedic jobsworths were there in 20 minutes. They insisted that the friend's daughter spend the next twenty minutes cleaning the patient before they'd even lift her onto the stretcher. The patient suffered serious brain damage.
I wondered if enough Galileo satellites would be behind the Earth's shadow in a Carrington Event or a Gamma Ray Burst to keep the system working when they reappeared. Upon checking - they fly at very roughly 4 Earth radiuses altitude, so the answer to the question is "probably not". I haven't investigated the other systems.
Coronal Mass Ejections (that's what the Carrington event was) have the potential to send the ionosphere into scintillation (it's what makes stars appear to twinkle) for a few days after impacting the Earth's magnetosphere.
The GPS receiver picks up the signals, but they're being continually, and rapidly, altered in terms of the apparent path length they've travelled from the satellites. This means either very poor resolution, or (more likely) that the GPS signal is told to send a Do Not Use flag until the ionosphere has settled down.
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>every day that the high will be less than 45°F
We had a day like that four winters or so ago which is why I don't own much flannel any more (beard of course, so much less work than shaving every day lol). Now the rest of this week being 45 C woof. Still never having to shovel snow off my sidewalk or scrape my car windows in the morning makes it worth it.
Hipsters and milennials would be dead in days, unable to find a stream or river without a map. Those of us relying on knowledge handed down by our elders might survive a lot longer.
Read that as "Hipsters and milennials would be dead in days, unable to find a stream or river with or without a map."
Those of us relying on knowledge handed down by our elders might survive a lot longer.
Luddite. I'd rely on my handy Army Field Manual.
ESA is indeed separate from the EU, but Galileo is an EU project* even though most of it is managed by ESA.
The funding and political overtones to the project are complex and stupid, but the underlying idea of having a European system for political and technological independence of the USA or Russia is a fairly good idea.
[*] also with some participation by China, Israel, and others.
If the GPS sats are clobbered by a Carrington event
These satellites are not known for trailing very long conductive loops, so I doubt this would even be a problem.
As for a Gamma Ray Burster, you will have to redecorate the whole shop in any case, not sure if the remaining 600 million years of biologically usable Earth will be sufficient though.
And yet those damned capitalists in the USA let everyone use theirs for free.
Sooner or later I expect it will occur to that nice Mr Trump that the Mexicans should pay for their GPS as well as their wall. All he has to do it switch the civilian signal off as the satellites overfly countries which haven't coughed up. He will have stumbled onto a good business model - drug dealers often give the heroin away until their clients are addicted.
"Of course the UK could just use the EU’s Galileo GPS system that went live in December.....oh wait, post-Brexit the UK will now have to negotiate, and pay for access to it"
The public service is free. There are extra services with improved accuracy and/or resiliency which require a subscription, but they shouldn't change in cost or availability because of Brexit.
@ oxfordmale78
I suppose you have to ask Farage or Boris what you should do, could be you have been exploited and are not fully independent either. Perhaps you should also ask to have your contributions returned.
About ESA:
The European Space Agency (ESA) is an intergovernmental organisation of 22 member states, dedicated to the exploration of space. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, France, ESA has a worldwide staff of about 2,000[5] and an annual budget of about €5.25 billion / US$5.77 billion (2016)"
The UK contribution in mill E (UKSA) 324.8 8.7% of the budget 2016.
Italy 512.0 13.7%
France 844.5 22.6%
Germany 872.6 23.3%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency
If we have to pay for it, aren't we entitled to a refund?
Oh, boy. I do hope you're one of Mr Davis' team of crack (or should that be cracked?) negotiators!
International agreements are strangely very different to restaurant bills. The UK was not pressured into signing up to contributing to the development costs (which largely go to fund UK jobs on the project). As long as the contract is honoured by both sides then their shouldn't be any problems. But should the UK now wish to withdraw from such arrangements then the other counterparties would be under no obligation to honour any of it, including preferential access for companies based in signatory countries.
Rinse and repeat for a whole heap of similar agreements.
Seems like a pretty ignorant statement. All GNSS systems don't have a direct fee - they all have free access for non-commercial/non-military use.
I can and do access Compass/Beidou, GPS and GLONASS signals in the US all the time. Galileo is not worth it because there just aren't many satellites up yet.
Not really a backup.
If we had a solar flare like in the 19th C, it might knock out ALL satellites.
Does the report even consider Mobile Basestations, DAB and DTT transmitters etc where the GPS module is used purely for timing instead of a local stable clock? Or even one distributed by fibre?
.. the folding map business is likely to make a mint that day, if it still exists.
You can recognise people who work in risk management: they still update their Falk Verlag* maps in their glove compartment. Yes, guilty :)
* They have a very clever, patented technique for map folding.
@big_D
and there was me thinking I was being original. I do exactly the same. I draw little maps on the post-it as well for the last bit.
I bought a road map the other week and my partner asked me why on earth I would do such a thing, to which my reply was that it's obvious, you should always have a backup in case your phone dies or the network goes down.
There's also maps.me which is a nice offline map backup.
Top Tip: Rather than downloading on your phone you can get the maps here using something like wget
http://direct.mapswithme.com/direct/latest/ and just copy them across.
A 2 or 3 in to the Mile map gives the user a better perspective of an area. Something that a small handheld screen can never do very well. Only the Tesla with its huge screen could get close.
As for OS maps... There is a huge amount of detail on them that most Satnavs completel ignore. Got sent down one road and came to a Ford. Not even identified by the SatNav yet clearly marked on the OS map.
I use not together even when I'm on my Motorcycle.
Audi drivers doing 'The Full Audi.'
Just the other day, I had an uneducated clown in an Audi (of course) SUV tailgating about a foot behind at 100+ kmh.
The ugly pug-faced bastard owes me about $1 for the good liter of washer fluid that I sprayed all over him. Triggered the headlight washers too. Splash!! He sure backed off then.
For the win!! LOL
I tried sun sightings in my back garden a couple of years ago to see how easy it was. A 12 quid plastic sextant off ebay, a mirror and a spirit level to get it flat (since I can't see the horizon here) and with a bit of practice I could get fixes to within about 3 miles. Good enough for navigation though not pilotage.
Apparently people with more skill can get within half a mile, which I find rather impressive, but it's not GPS and you need to take sightings several hours apart to get the lines to cross at sensible angles. So the OP may be right about the Hondas.
we could keep going for a bit with reduced accuracy using that handy crowd-sourced WiFi / cell tower to GPS / positional mapping data that the big companies like Apple and Google have been slurping for the last 10 years. My old iPod did a fair job of location finding, and that's not got any sort of a GNSS chip in it.
My God! Why do you think the satellite industry is so heavily dominated by males? They'd rather design a space satellite navigation system engineered around near-quantum effects, precision components built to a tolerance unheard of and ruggedised to withstand the harsh radiation environment of space and launched atop multimillion pound rocket delivery systems, than actually have to ASK for directions.
The whole concept of GNSS came about when a rocket engineer's wife was nagging him to stop the car and ask the postman which was the right road for Weymouth town centre.
Weston-Super-Mare is even worse. It's like some sort of quantum singularity at the centre of it. You cannot escape. And apparently if you do manage to escape, you go insane. I know, I was there once. For FOUR HOURS. I went under the same narrow railway bridge eight times.
Problem #1 is most cell tower systems rely on GPS for timing/frequency control and simply would go off-line without it. WiFi maybe in built up areas, but not in the country side really. Again, problem #2 is you would need to be prepared before the event to have all of the wifi database on your device, because if it goes wrong then #1 will prevent you getting it.
Yes, they could invest in better oscillators and systems to last longer, but it is a commercial system at the end of the day...
£1bn per day?
UK GDP is around £2 trn a year. So that's £5.5bn per day. Do these twerps really believe that almost a fifth of GDP is created by shaving a few seconds of ambulance arrivals and helping zero hours van drivers deliver imported Chinese tat sold by a US company that avoids UK taxes?
And in case they haven't noted, congested roads are the norm. With few strategic route duplications and local roads already congested, loss of GPS wouldn't make much difference at all.
I remember the days, when emergency services, cabbies and delivery drivers knew where the heck they were driving!
The former had local knowledge and generally could get where they wanted without any assistance.
I still use my navigation system maybe once or twice a year, tops.
>>What a load of crap
Yea, 'cos anyone trying to warn up front of problems is a doom-mongering moron. Bit like those pesky fire regulators. I bet they're all remainers too, right? It's not like the emergency services or communications, or stretched NHS workers, or anyone who actually does a real job depend on sat nav in any way, right?
When IT manages to reliably construct large scale systems which actually work, instead of the repeated fiascos sucking tax payer dollars, then it'll have time to snipe.
For now, I'd keep a low profile. Sadly, It's not like govt. will take any notice, they seem to have rather a lot on. So no need to pooh your pants.
995M of that 1bn would be the loss for financial services.
Those things can't deal well with downtime of any kind, rely on accurate timing and juggle ginormous amounts of money. Real money in the world: 5 tn. Virtual money tied up in stock, debt and derivatives markets: 2000+ tn.
> Looking on the bright side, a world without GPS is a world without Uber.
Not really. Uber would still have come about since traditional taxi services are so utterly crap.
The only difference is that Uber cars would get lost a lot more often. But since many Uber drivers seem to be incapable of following GPS-driven driving instructions, it would make little difference.
Currently we have GPS, GLONASS and Galileo to choose from and by 2020 ish China will have expanded BeiDou to be global, then as has been mentioned there is the wi-fi/celltower geolocation stuff if close is good enough or are they proposing some apocalypse proof system? in which case id suggest the stop and ask someone method, you will be furnished with a list of turnings and pubs you will go past to get to where you want to be.
The key word is "augmented": if the satellites go down, there's nothing to augment.
I must admit that, on seeing this story, I though that the undead eLORAN proposal had again risen from its coffin. And, sure enough, if one follows the links in the article, the full report turns out to discuss (even-handedly) it at some length as one possible fall-back.
And also a new positioning system based on Iridium satellites, which I hadn't heard of before. Looks like it's less precise than GPS, but with higher signal power.
It's reassuring that the first alternative the report considers for road navigation is good old-fashioned maps.
But maps still don't tell you where you are, sat navs and phones will still show a map, you'll just have to work out where you are on it - hence I'm going to start a petition to fire up DECCA again :)
A terrestrial system like DECCA/LORAN would be a good solution, or maybe even build in positioning signals into an emergency services communications network if we're that worried about losing satellites for any length of time
Since GPS is pretty much line of sight and you need to be in site of 4 towers (3 if you don't need height) then you would need quite a lot of towers.
As an alternative, why not a national grid of towers with their OSGB grid coordinates painted in large friendly letters? Then you would know where you were exactly
...which prompted the Russians and the Chineese to do the same, so now we're going to have 3 politically independent systems. (There's an agreement for the US to be able to shut down Galileo if they wish to, and currently it doesn't seem like it's ever going to work, so I'm not counting it)
Building combined receivers is simple and that's why many phones have them. However some critical applications (timing mostly) may only have single standard receivers. Those would need to be upgraded with an additional multi standard timing receiver. For applications like DVB-T or DAB SFN synchronisation it would still take a day or more for the oscillators to drift enough in holdover mode for it to become a problem.
Perhaps it's time for someone to build an NTP-disciplined oscillator. :) (NTP has lots of short time yitter, but obviously no long term drift, so it might work)
"As of December 2016 the system has 18 of 30 satellites in orbit. Galileo started offering Early Operational Capability (EOC) on 15 December 2016[1] and is expected to reach Full Operational Capability (FOC) in 2019.[8] The complete 30-satellite Galileo system (24 operational and 6 active spares) is expected by 2020. "
Perhaps it's time for someone to build an NTP-disciplined oscillator. :)
(NTP has lots of short time yitter, but obviously no long term drift, so it might work)
Isn't that what my time servers are?
And to reduce the jitter, use Precision Time Protocol.
"It is also designed for applications that cannot bear the cost of a GPS receiver at each node, or for which GPS signals are inaccessible."
Perhaps it's time for someone to build an NTP-disciplined oscillator. :) (NTP has lots of short time yitter, but obviously no long term drift, so it might work)
It does work, sorta. The 3G femtocell devices use long sequences (2hrs or so) of NTP queries to get enough accuracy to discipline the local oscillator. My device seems to do it every 24 hours or so.
As for local knowledge, that seems to be disappearing for all the services that need it. I was talking to a coastguard officer recently & he said that his area would be concentrating to the national centre in Fareham, but that his people didn't want to move to Fareham so their local expertise would be lost.
Cheap inertial devices are getting better so they may be stable enough soon for trips of a few hours, especially with road lock to estimate the drifts. Also the nav display function 'I think I'm here. Touch the screen where I really am' would set it up for a journey.
>...which prompted the Russians and the Chineese to do the same,<
The Russian systems long predate Galileo, and the Chinese system is an ordinary bit of pork barrelling for local industry. -- Something that anyone directly involved with Standards would understand.
Any country which expects to initiate and/or be sole survivor of the War Of Mutual Assured Destruction (WOMAD - although the name is a clue) will want to have its own GPS system, both for use -in- the war, and afterwards when it's the only one left. Thus, the U.S., Russia, China, and, um, France. (The rockets are French named. Do the math. Yes, I know Galileo was Italian, but do you think - ) Or call it Eurovision - then Australia gets to enter.
Once upon a time, the Russians got uppity about tech gear being imported into the Russian Federation that supported GPS but not Glonass, and imposed a big duty on it. Consequently, most subsequent satnav hardware, from about the iPhone 4S onward, supports GPS, Glonass, and Magellan.
Once upon a different time, GPS was top-secret US technology. When it got made less so, apart from the well known 'selective availabilty' feature, there was also a requirement that chipsets for consumer equipment not operate above about 200mph, so that miscreants couldn't use them to build their own cruise missiles.
Which makes for fun when taking screenshots with a cameraphone when travelling with Eurostar or Ryanair, because automotive satnavs always presume you're on a road. 186mph on the M2, 490mph on the N174 south of Saint-Lô, and so on. So I think we're all using Glonass from time to time, even if we're not aware of it.
@david - I think you need to check out your history there. GPS (formerly NAVSTAR) was developed by the US Department of Defense, and it was only after the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 by the USSR when it drifted off course into its airspace that Ronald Reagan mandated that the system be made available for civilian use.
GPS started working in 1995. The program was launched by Reagon after 1983. Which is 12 years of non-secret development of a civilian system for civilian purposes. The period 65-85 saw a complete revolution in electronics and satellite technology: "GPS" was not based on obsolete military technology, and the technology it was based on was not secret.
In the USA, the "military budget" got used to develop lots of civilian technology. It was used as a method of trade protection ("Free trade! (except for military contracts)") and as a method of pork barreling ("No government intervention in the market! (except for military contracts)").
The military does, of course, have an interest in navigation, just like the rest of us. Their proposals for navigation systems would eventually have seen civilian use, if the civilian system based on new technology hadn't been developed and funded.
'Besides navigation, many industries are reliant on GPS software for swathes of critical applications such as financial trading and precision docking of oil tankers.'
I'm fairly sure precision docking of oil tankers comes under the general heading of navigation. Or maybe pilotage, but that's just navigation's precocious younger brother.
We WERE going to get eLoRaN, cheap, reliable, when it went wrong you could send a fat bloke in a van to fix it. Now however, it has to be space based because America and Russia and China have space ones. Pathetic.
A highly accurate timing system is a side effect of GPS, so basically why use something else?
I remember being told by the Weapons Engineering Officer of one of her Majesty's finest warships that there were ~16 GPS antenna on the superstructure. At most two of them were going to something who's primary function was navigation related, everything else was accurate timing.
It's cheaper.
An "atomic" clock is maybe $2,000. I've not checked lately. Could be less. You can even get one that fits in your pocket (battery life may be an issue). This is why DTT, DAB, Mobile phone masts all use GPS. Obviously only for timing as they are not mobile.
One GHz terrestrial system I know has an oven based "clock reference" only in the main mast and then the clients lock to a pilot carrier for stability, to save £100 per unit.
The BBC used to distribute an atomic clock signal nationally.
A GPS receiver is so cheap! Just a few quid. Much smaller and lower power, so very many systems just take the easy way out and don't worry about the US turning it off or a big Solar Flare (which might fry all the satellites, will Sky refund customers?)
"An "atomic" clock is maybe $2,000. I've not checked lately. Could be less. "
It depends on what you want. A rubidium clock is comparatively cheap, but they aren't quite as precise as caesium clocks. The later still costs 50k new and regularly requires changing the tube inside of it. That's to expensive to put in every cell-tower, but not a problem for a TV station which already pays 100k for a camera and another 100k for the lens.
"One GHz terrestrial system I know has an oven based "clock reference" only in the main mast and then the clients lock to a pilot carrier for stability, to save £100 per unit."
That's also standard for mobile phones, otherwise you couldn't get the carrier precise enough.
Frying all the satellites is unlikely, BTW, as half of them are on the "night" side of earth. The failures I've found so far were only temporary.
(Maybe I should at least skim the report. Maybe we all should.)
What we don't know are all the non-obvious (non-navigation) uses which have got baked into applications over the years:
- train doors' safety systems - unverified, but I was told that on Southern Trains the doors can only be released by the driver/guard at stations (as determined by GPS), and that if there isn't a GPS signal (at some covered stations) then it requires manual over-ride
- precision timing, to synchronise radio-networks such as mobile-phone base-stations, and single-frequency-network digital TV and DAB radio transmissions.
"What we don't know are all the non-obvious (non-navigation)"
There are lots of them but failure of those systems due to failure of GPS satellites isn't going to cost the equivalent of 3 National Health Services, not on the 1st day never mind ongoing.
Except all those back-ups would be taken out by the same coronal mass ejection if one were to happen. So you've basically said, 'lets keep the backup servers in the same basement as the primary one', it's okay for some failure modes but for the rest you've just got three time or four times the broken parts.
Many consumer GPS systems come equipped with the Russian GLONASS system these days, In my part of the world we also enjoy BEIDOU - both free.
And, somewhere, there is Galileo.
And what of Dodderhill, just outside the village of Wychbold, near Droitwich in Worcestershire where the BBC Long Wave service is transmitted? It already carries radio data encoded using phase modulation.
They might be short of valves / tubes but they could chat with engineers who worked at the late Decca Navigator and get copies of the circuits of their solid state RF amplifiers. The present carrier frequency is controlled by a rubidium atomic frequency standard.
I guess one worry is all the debris that floating about in near earth orbit. A flake of paint traveling at 10000 mph can put a hole through a fragile satellite. Image if a you get an out of control satellite that impacts another satellite that could create enough debris to cause a chain reaction which could wipe out every satellite in orbit, not just GPS.
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