Image: John Hartzell
What’s New: An OpEd by MerlinTPS CEO Christian Kotscher published in Location Business News.
Why Its Important:
- Dependence on GPS continues to grow and, in the U.S. and the west we don’t have widely deployed alternatives.
- Reliability of GPS continues to decrease with increasing threats and increasing actual disruptions.
- The US and the west, except perhaps Great Britain, don’t have a way forward to make their societies safer
- Over-dependence is a huge problem, no question. BUT we all have to be careful about the claims we make. Examples:
- Many financial cores like stock exchanges and trading companies say they have GPS-independent sources of time and are immune from GPS problems.
- Many major telecommunications companies say they have fiber systems to backup time for their networks.
- BUT who is checking on any of these claims? Where are the government mandates and regulations to keep the nation safe?
- So… while it is a huge problem, there are lots of subtleties and lots of uncertainty.
What Else to Know: MerlinTPS offers non-GPS PNT services.
Without a GPS Backup, Doomsday is Just a Matter of Time
By Christian Kotscher, CEO, MerlinTPS
Time was an afterthought for much of human history. Sure, the idea of knowing how long the sun would be out during the day existed in ancient Egypt when they used sundials to measure time. But keeping time didn’t truly take its more present-day form until the turn of the 19th century and the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Today, people hardly realize how dependent our everyday lives are on accurate and reliable time measurements.
The U.S. is hardly alone when it comes to its reliance on accurate and reliable time signals for critical infrastructure systems. Critical infrastructure systems operating in the financial, telecommunications, energy, healthcare and transportation sectors cannot function properly without accurate time signals, and timing system failures can have serious consequences, with the potential implications including economic loss, reduced safety and loss of human life. These systems’ primary time synchronization sources are signals broadcasted by GPS satellites, which has understandably led to concerns about our dependency on GPS timing.
