Counting the cost of GPS vulnerability: Why the US needs a terrestrial backup

Counting the cost of GPS vulnerability: Why the US needs a terrestrial backup

GPS is a critical asset for nations worldwide, underpinning essential services across telecommunications, utilities, finance, defense and many other sectors. The technology has driven massive economic growth, contributing an estimated $1.4 trillion to the US economy alone.

In October, to determine the potential financial impact of a prolonged GPS blackout, NextNav commissioned the Brattle Group to compile a report. Drawing on diverse sources, including a study commissioned by the US Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the report showed how positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services provided by GPS have become integral to how the economy functions.

A 60-billion-dollar (avoidable) disaster

Taking critical sectors together, the Brattle Group study estimates that a month-long outage could wipe $58.2 billion off the US economy. This is a worst-case scenario, but shorter GPS interruptions could still result in losses of up to $1 billion per day. What's more, the ripple effects would include significant disruption and possibly even loss of life. Here are just some sectors that would be affected:

• Telecommunications: A prolonged GPS outage would severely disrupt telecommunications. Slower data rates would be the initial impact, followed by the eventual shutdown of base stations due to a lack of synchronization. This would affect everything from casual internet use to critical mobile network services, leaving this sector bearing the brunt of the costs.
• Emergency services: The efficiency of emergency services would be eroded, as the lack of location services would hinder response times and compromise public safety.
• Finance and banking: Disruption to GPS timing could undermine confidence in financial systems. Without precise timestamps for transactions, financial networks would struggle to function reliably, potentially causing compounding economic damage over time.
• Utilities: Energy grids could experience blackouts or brownouts, and grid management would become far less efficient.

In conflict zones, weak GPS signals are routinely blocked using inexpensive yet incredibly effective off-the-shelf equipment. Though the possibility of these types of cyberattacks occurring nationwide across the US is small, it does exist. It also makes sense to be prepared for physical attacks on satellites and direct hits from a coronal mass ejection (CME), like the 1859 Carrington Event. A solar flare event on this scale could put GPS out of commission for weeks.

Both China and Russia have deployed terrestrial backup systems that secure PNT continuity. Meanwhile, the US has decommissioned legacy infrastructure that could have been retrofitted, and recent progress on modern alternatives has faltered. To plug the gap in PNT defenses, in 2020, the US government issued guidance to private and public sector operators about the "responsible use of PNT services," tasking NIST with updating PTP profiles that owners and operators of critical infrastructure are encouraged to adopt. This was followed by DHS standards for PNT, which have yet to be implemented in the US.

Adopting NextNav's proposal to reconfigure the lower 900MHz band, for instance, could provide the US economy with a $10.8 billion insurance policy against GPS outages, achieved without taxpayer funding. Additionally, it offers $3.8 billion in benefits through increased resiliency. According to The Brattle Group's report, the total quantified value of implementing this GPS backup solution is $14.6 billion. Of course, these estimates are also applicable to other cPNT solutions.

Time is money

The evidence clearly shows that any economy relying solely on GPS for PNT services is vulnerable to significant disruption. With no national PNT backup infrastructure to fall back on in the US, it makes sense to invest in solutions such as NextNav's or other cPNT solutions as an effective insurance policy.