What Happens If Satnav fails?
Date: Tuesday, March 08 @ 11:28:21 UTC
Topic:
 A report published today by the Royal Academy of Engineering has once again raised the spectre of our over reliance on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and associated technology.
The detailed report reveals just how reliant, maybe overly so, we have become. GNSS provides highly accurate timing signals which are extensively used in banking, telecommunications and even quantum cryptography as well as the traditional users in road transport, maritime and aviation.
A number of interesting points are raised in the report. With no-one having a clear oversight of GNSS and those who rely on the data, no-one can accurately predict the outcome of a partial or total failure of the network. But what is clear is that an outage could bring down communications networks, affect banking systems and a myriad of other services and let's not forget the navigation systems that now rely on GPS.
And the concerns are justified. There are a number of areas in which GNSS is vulnerable. There is a lack of redundancy in the satellite constellations, the risk of human error in the uploading of data to the satellites, clock errors, service interruption due to radiation, solar storms etc and the ever present fear of terrorism with attacks on ground based installations vital to the system.
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