PNT Resiliency Race, the chasm between trials and adoption – Location Business News

by | Aug 29, 2023 | Blog

Image: National PNT Architecture, 2008, US DoD & DOT

What’s New: Opinion piece about how adoption is as important as systems. It doesn’t matter how many systems are out there if they aren’t used. Seat belts don’t do any good if folks don’t use them.

Why It’s Important: The “adoption issue” has been used as an excuse by some in government for not doing anything to make national PNT more resilient. Yet this ignores the fact that government has at least two big leadership roles.

  • There has to be something that people are willing to adopt. Commercial providers have a hard time competing, really can’t compete, with free GPS in many cases. The US government deliberately created wide dependence on highly precise, free, ubiquitous PNT. This eliminated any large market for PNT that might have been created otherwise. So the government will have to be directly involved in establishing one or more widely-adopted complements/backups/alternatives.

 

  • Once there is something to adopt the government has LOTS of ways to encourage folks to adopt a service or technology. Some examples of how that worked with GPS:
    • Government invested in the system heavily so other users were confident it would be around for the long haul and it would be worth their while going to the trouble and expense of incorporating it into their own enterprises.
    • Access to the signal was free.
    • Signal specs were made public and everyone was encouraged to make further use of signals.
    • Government invested in lots of R&D and sponsored app development by others.
    • Government incorporated GPS into all its ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, and other systems.
    • User equipment SWAP-C was driven as low as possible through  research and quantity.

What Else to Know: The fundamental problem is that within the federal government PNT is not “a thing/” So no one is really in charge. We haven’t had a major failure. “Little Suzie hasn’t died yet.” Leadership has a hard time focusing on preventing a problem when it is in the midst of responding to so many others.

 

PNT Resiliency Race

By

LBN Staff

 –

Opinion

The chasm between trials and adoption

By Ashu Pande

The resiliency section on the U.S. government GPS.gov site draws attention to the part of the U.S. Space-Based PNT Policy which states: “The widespread and growing dependence on GPS by military, civil, and commercial applications, systems, and infrastructure make the performance of many of these systems inherently vulnerable if disruption or manipulation of GPS signals were to occur. GPS users must plan for potential signal loss and take reasonable steps to verify or authenticate the integrity of the received GPS data and ranging signal, especially in applications where even small degradations can result in loss of life.”

There is no doubt that GPS or rather GNSS resiliency is now a requirement. Over the past few years, there have been trials and testbeds set up to demonstrate alternate Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) technologies that hold the potential to bring resiliency and deliver an Assured Positioning Navigation and Timing (APNT) system. Various technologies met and even surpassed the benchmark set in these trials.

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