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    Britain to build backup GPS to protect country in event of attack
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    Britain to build backup GPS to protect country in event of attack

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    1. OneNormalBloke on

      Britain is to build a backup GPS system to protect the country in the event of a foreign attack, The Telegraph can reveal.

      A world-first system to detect when British satellites are being tampered with is also being bankrolled by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology amid concerns about interference from enemy nations.

      The stock market, banking infrastructure, energy grid, satellite navigation, mobile phone signals and emergency services all rely on technologies that provide precise positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) data.

      This is provided by global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technologies including the familiar US-owned GPS and Galileo, the EU’s similar satellite system that went live in 2016.

      However, satellite technology is easily blocked with jamming equipment that can be as small as a mobile phone and can cut communications from Earth to space. Russia is increasingly using such techniques in its invasion of Ukraine.

      It is estimated that a one-day PNT cut in Britain could cost the economy around £1.4bn.

      The Government has now approved a £71m GPS contingency plan that would go live should the normal system go down. The project, eLoran, is expected to be operational by 2030.

      The backup will be less precise than GPS and will not be a like-for-like replacement, but will be reliable and strong enough to cover Britain’s entire defence, critical infrastructure and industry in an emergency.

    2. OSUBrit on

      Or maybe we shouldn’t have cut ourselves off from the Galileo system we’d already put resources into for years.

    3. TheShakyHandsMan on

      Is Branson going to get himself back in a balloon and get high enough to maintain a geostationary orbit?

      Solves two problems in one.

    5. PartyPoison98 on

      Breaking: Britain to cancel new backup GPS after 5 years and £10bn spent on consultants and paperwork.

    6. Sea-Caterpillar-255 on

      This is a much more complex problem than the article actually grapples with.

      For defence, you’ll need a global system which this doesn’t seem to be. Plus GPS has effectively 2 modes, civilian and military. Military is already very difficult to jam (that’s why it’s used, if it could be jammed with a cheap handheld device that would be pretty pointless). So we should really be using the military type for most defence purposes. And (not or, and) we should be using Galileo.

      For civilian use, precision (precise and universal and free time signaling) is the main thing industry uses these signals for. So again, a less precise (and non universal) is pretty useless. Plus this poses a major issue: government can just upgrade defence systems to use the new infra. But very few private companies will invest in the same for their systems because it’s expensive. Also, most people buy off the shelf, so unless major manufacturers decide to add this, and it’s a feature only useful in the UK, they likely won’t be able to adopt it even if they want to. The same basic logic goes for more retail commercial tech. Will Apple Pay to add this to all their phones just so UK users can use it in the even we suffer jamming? I doubt it.

    7. CyberPunkDongTooLong on

      First sentence 

      “Positioning system will use radio towers on the ground rather than relying on easily-jammed satellite signals”

      So in no way whatsoever GPS. Great journalism.

    8. Captain_English on

      I am once again begging people to read the article.

      It’s a ground based system based on LORAN, which is a well proven technology using fixed radio towers, as an emergency reversionary system should satellite based navigation be degraded or denied within the UK.

      It’s not global, it’s not satellite based, and it’s not as accurate as mature GPS systems, but it is a damn sight cheaper than space launches, and makes a lot of sense for national resilience. 

    9. Kiloete on

      if a war gets so bad GPS is knocked out and the UK is invaded it’s a bit late for GPS to actually be functional, no? seems like a waste of money.

    10. Negative-Raise-6398 on

      We should be investing in Spitfires 💪 They didn’t need no bloody GPS to take out Jerry 🪖