Digital Trends: Why GPS is critical to your smartphone — and desperately needs an overhaul

GPS powers the global economy, and a GPS outage would cost the United States alone an estimated $1 billion per day. Most modern technology and large portion of infrastructure is dependent on GPS, yet the U.S. lacks backup geolocation technology, meaning outages or interference could be catastrophic.

Sascha Brodsky of Digital Trends recently spoke to NextNav CEO & Co-founder, Ganesh Pattabiraman about the risks to GPS and our recent acquisition of Nestwave, to help strengthen our own resilient PNT solution, TerraPoiNT.

‘TerraPoiNT’s signal is over 100,000 times stronger than GPS, and its signal encryption makes it more resistant to jamming and spoofing,’ Ganesh Pattabiraman, NextNav’s CEO, told Digital Trends in an interview. It’s an intriguing stat — and a glimpse of how we can (and should) safeguard GPS.

GPS provides positioning, navigation, timing services as well as location services for mobile phones. Its widespread availability has made it a global utility integral to industries and infrastructure, ranging from the electrical grid to 911 emergency services to financial transactions. But, Pattabiraman said, the system is “incredibly vulnerable” to interference — including jamming and spoofing.”

Read the full article to learn more about recent disruptions and other experts in this field working strengthen GPS backup solutions and awareness.