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Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1B per day
- drmpeg 7y agoBack in the 80's, I used to work with one of the architects of GPS, Dr. James Spilker at his company Stanford Telecommunications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spilker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spilker He was quite a character back then and was an avid body building enthusiast. Sometimes he'd come to work all buttered up with tanning lotion. He also had a fabulous trophy wife. Before I was hired at Stanford Telecom, I worked across the street. When Mrs. Spilker would come to visit Jim, she would park her Mercedes in the street right in front of the building. The sales guy who had an office up front would spot her and call the engineers in the lab. We'd all run up front and ogle her in her Spandex workout outfit as she walked in. Good times! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjgL4GefLUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjgL4GefLUE
- throwaway190617 7y agoTo me, 'trophy wife' comes across as unnecessarily disparaging: the Spilkers have been married for 45 years.
- vikramkr 7y agoSomething about this comment feels off - was she really a trophy wife, and is oogling someone really some thing to look back on as good times instead of "wow, we were creepy" times? Also from the wiki, it looks like she was the founder of a real estate firm and all. Calling her a trophy wife when they've been married that many years and she has a professional life and all just comes off as so strange and sleazy
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sky_rw 7y agoOh so THIS is that sexism in the tech industry that everybody keeps complaining about. Great stuff bro.
- godzillabrennus 7y agoThis seems pretty low. People depend on electronic navigation almost exclusively these days.
- mikeash 7y agoMy thoughts exactly. How many millions would be unable to get to work (or stranded at work)? So many people have lost the ability to navigate without it.
- moftz 7y agoYour phone can do a lot with just the cell towers for navigation. The towers themselves would lose GPS signal but they are stationary, they should be able to pump out location despite the loss of signal. The guy out in the middle of nowhere might be screwed but there always should be a backup navigational aid when you are that far out. A GNSS blackout would be more of an issue for ships and planes. Both can get by in most cases with a GPS blackout using beacons, dead-reckoning, maps, and other old-school techniques. However, a major solar storm could cause issues with all of the navigational instruments (radios, compasses), you might be limited to just using a sextant and a precise clock.
- floatboth 7y agoCell towers do not "pump out" location. Your phone queries Google/Apple/Mozilla/OpenCellID/whatever with the IDs of the towers it sees, the service returns approximate location based on its database of towers' locations. Same is done with WiFi SSIDs.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoAs a metaphor for triangulation, "cell towers pump out location" is a passable first-order approximation, even though the infrastructure is far more complex.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoReally, is that a thing? I'm completely unable to redo a nontrivial GPS route without the GPS after a handful of times, but I can definitely redo routine routes. At first I'd expect so can anyone else.
- brohee 7y agoI would understand if it was a full GNSS outage, must most "GPS" equipment nowadays is multi-constellation, using as much as four (GPS, Galileo, Glonass, BeiDou). The loss of one constellation should go undetected by most end users.
- zaarn 7y agoWhat disaster would knock out only one constellation out of four (perfectly one) and also go unnoticed to users?
- brohee 7y agoPolitically driven shutdown. But the point I just made makes it unlikely, it's not the weapon it once was.
- jerf 7y agoThe phrase that should strike fear into the heart of any engineer who has to work at scale (any kind of scale, not just software): "Correlated failures". A software bug that affects only one of them. The political possibility mentioned elsewhere. Some computer virus never "intended" for a satellite manages to get into one of them for some reason, most likely a very bizarre one that nobody would have ever guessed could happen but still somehow did. Some hardware component that turns out to fail all at the same time (more or less), used by all of a particular constellation. Or most likely of all, something I can't even think of to put here as an example, but still it somehow turns out that a particular failure ends up having as a side effect greatly increasing the chance of failures in the rest of the system despite all the efforts to prevent that. (The "ones we can't even think of" end up with elevated probabilities precisely because we don't think to prevent them and thus put no engineering into preventing them.) All of these outcomes are low probability, sure, but they are all vastly higher probability than sufficient simultaneous independent failures to take down the system. It's why despite all the incredible software engineering that goes into Google and AWS, they still go down sometimes. Almost no conceivable set of independent events can take those things down, but correlated failures still can, do, and will continue to do so.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
- Fnoord 7y agoIf devices have other radios such as WiFi and GSM these can function as a backup plan (I don't think BT would suffice, unless there would be P2P between Bluetooth devices with devices who can provide coordinates such as WiFi and GSM). For example, the first iPhone used Apple WiFi positioning; it didn't have GPS. I still remember I had a an iPod Touch with a 3rd party GPS which worked with the predecessor of Cydia. Check the sources UnifiedNlp [1] can use. Quoting: > AppleWifiNlpBackend - Uses Apple's service to resolve Wi-Fi locations. It has excellent coverage but the database is proprietary. > OpenWlanMapNlpBackend - Uses OpenWlanMap.org to resolve user location but the NLP backend did not reach release-quality, yet. Users interested in a freely licensed and downloadable database for offline use should stick with openBmap for now - Last updated in 2015 > OpenBmapNlpBackend - Uses openBmap to resolve user location. Community-created, freely licensed database that can optionally be downloaded for offline operation. The coverage varies from country to country (it's best in central Europe). > MozillaNlpBackend - Uses the Mozilla Location Service to resolve user location. The coverage is OK. Only the cell tower database is free. > LocalWifiNlpBackend - Local location provider for Wi-Fi APs using on-phone generated database. > LocalGSMLocationProvider - Local opencellid based location provider backend. Has been surpassed by LocalGSMBackend which also has an OpenCellID option - Last update in 2014 > LocalGSMBackend - Local location provider for GSM cells. It works offline by downloading freely licensed database files from Mozilla, OpenCellID, or lacells.db. [1] https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp
- ImprovedSilence 7y agoI think a lot of cellular technologies rely on GPS on their base stations as a timing reference. Most cellular capabilities might fall off a cliff if GPS isn’t available.
- myself248 7y agoRight. They have a few hours of holdover before things start to lose sync, and when sync degrades, the towers may stay on the air but handoffs get real rough. They may also take themselves off the air after too long in holdover, but that's a software setting. Conceivably this could be overridden by network operators (in close cooperation with their equipment vendor) in a prolonged GPS outage where it was determined that having the towers on-air as islands without handoff would be better than nothing.
- Maxious 7y ago"Collins Aerospace is coordinating with safety regulators and its equipment clients after a GPS connection outage on its parts resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of flights, especially flights on aircraft operated by US regional carriers." [June 10 2019] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/collins-gps-outage-grounds-regional-flights-458819/ https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/collins-gps-outag...
- gchadwick 7y agoIt would be interesting to know of everything that uses GPS what % of use is purely for a very accurate synchronised time source vs uses that actually require the location aspect. The article states 'The researchers found that the largest benefit, valued at $685.9 billion, came in the "telecommunications" category, including improved reliability and bandwidth utilization for wireless networks'. I wonder if location is actually required for these purposes or it's purely the synchronised time source (clearly a useful thing to have when building communication systems). Edit: Ah the question is answered from another part of the article 'Wireless technology continues to evolve in ways that increase its reliance on highly precise timing, which in turn increases reliance on GPS.'
- moftz 7y agoYou might be able to use the 1Hz IRIG H code from WWV and WWVB to discipline a crystal oscillator to get a clean 10MHz.
- ljcn 7y agoAFAIK this isn't how it works; the GPS provides a reference so the skew of the crystal can be measured as it drifts.
- myself248 7y agoThat's literally what "discipline a crystal oscillator" means. You measure and then correct the skew. The crystal provides a local reference with low phase-noise, and the long-time-constant disciplining provides reasonable holdover performance.
- ljcn 7y agoThanks, I wasn't familiar with the jargon or the electronics. The original post said "might" but it seems that's exactly what cell sites use (GPSDOs).
- 7y ago
- sandworm101 7y agoNote that GPS and "GPS technology" are different things. When people say "GPS" they normally mean the US system and that is the one the article is talking about. But there are several satellite networks that each act as a global positioning systems using "GPS technology". We are seeing more and more devices that can access many different networks. This is a good thing. Not only does it increase redundancy in case of a widespread outage of one network, it diminishes any one nation's ability to disrupt positioning. No longer can the US simply turn off or obfuscate location data (they used to blur it. Google "GPS selective availability"). The existence of competitor networks allows users to quickly identify and ignore such actions.
- avian 7y agoGPS is specifically the name of the US system. GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite System, is a general name that also covers other systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation
- myself248 7y agoNAVSTAR is specifically the name of the US system. GNSS is the generic term. GPS could be used to mean either, and sucks as a term.
- sandworm101 7y agoIf we want to be really specific, the US program is now called "NAVSTAR GPS" and it was once manged by the "Interagency GPS Executive Board" ... so the people running NAVSTAR still call it GPS, internally at least.
- mbostleman 7y agoI think the headline is trying to imply that this is a big number, but at 1.8% of the world's daily GDP it doesn't seem like it. I would have thought GPS would have a lot more impact than that.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago1.8% of global GDP is huge!
- mbostleman 7y agoIt's 0.005% of GDP.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoYou said one day of GPS is 0.005% of one year GDP, but we're comparing a day of GPS to a day of GDP, so it seems proper to say it's 1.8% like your earlier quote, right? If we lost any length of time of GPS, it would be 1.8% of that period's GDP?
- myself248 7y agoNobody's talking about what might cause an outage. There are three basic parts to any GNSS: The control segment, the space segment, and the atmosphere on the way back down. The control segment is run by the military so let's assume it's as secure as any other military network, and that attacking it would be seen as an act of war. And there are several constellations run by various countries, who do not represent a common target. The space segment is vulnerable to space weather, but has proven pretty darn resilient so far. Even if a big CME or something knocked out a few satellites, there are ton of them up there, and most of the most critical applications only rely on timing, not positioning, and would work fine with a degraded constellation. The atmosphere is where it gets interesting; an airburst nuke will make the ionosphere basically opaque to such signals for quite some time. How long depends on a lot of details, but assume several weeks. This would affect all signals from all constellations for all users, and is IMHO the only threat worth worrying about. Because an airburst over the ocean might not be construed as an attack on any specific nation, but it would exact a huge economic toll on the most developed and tech-reliant nations. It must be a tempting option for a spastic tyrant who has a nuke or two and feels backed into a corner.
- Jonnax 7y agoWhat about space debris? Isn't there a non zero chance that a satellite could hit some debris and cause a chain reaction?
- gingabriska 7y agoIsn't there enough redundancy in space that one sat going down means nothing for the system
- xvector 7y agoNo, the issue with space debris is that we are quickly approaching the point where a single unfortunately placed collision could chain using a sort of exponential “shotgun effect”, destroying virtually all satellites at a given orbit and rendering space travel impossible for decades if not centuries, setting human space exploration back significantly as launches have to deal with thousands of metal shards traveling at tens of thousands of mph. See this video[1] by Kurzgesagt: “End of Space - Creating a Prison for Humanity.” [1]: https://youtu.be/yS1ibDImAYU https://youtu.be/yS1ibDImAYU