GPS Critical to the Economy, Must Be Protected, Wheeler Says
The federal government must protect GPS, which has become hugely important to public safety, critical infrastructure and the economy as a whole, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Friday at the start of a daylong commission workshop. “We have to make sure that we don’t mess that up,” he said. “These are not abstract issues."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Wheeler emphasized that the workshop focus would not be on whether the FCC should mandate receiver standards. “It’s about how best to protect GPS operations in the context of evolving technology and adjacent spectrum activities,” he said.
Tom Power, deputy federal chief technology officer, indicated that the White House is closely watching GPS issues. “It’s been really important to the administration to keep pushing on these issues,” Power said. The future of receivers and making them more efficient presents tough questions, he said. “You get into the question of what’s efficient.” Figuring out the answers will require a “long dialogue,” he said. “Obviously, part of the reason it takes some time is these receivers are built into so many pieces of equipment.” But Power said meetings like the one at the FCC are important in helping find the answers.
Under former Chairman Julius Genachowski the FCC took a deep dive on the issue of receiver standards, culminating in a two-day workshop at the agency two years ago. FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp closed that workshop saying the answer may or may not require new regulations from the agency (CD March 14/12 p1). Protecting GPS also emerged as a huge issue under Genachowski when the agency took up LightSquared’s proposal to launch a wireless network using spectrum shared by GPS. The FCC has posted many of the presentations from Friday’s workshop on its webpage (http://fcc.us/1qyFXaH).
"Virtually every” critical infrastructure industry “relies on GPS in some way, shape or form,” said David Simpson, chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau. In the wireless industry, more than 200 million U.S. cellphones and 300,000 cellsites use GPS, he said. The use of GPS for “timing” is especially critical, he said. In addition, 3G, 4G and LTE all rely on GPS, he said. “As we send through more data, higher data rates, in a given amount of spectrum, the need for accurate timing gets more and more important,” he said.
Simpson said the threats to GPS are increasing. Interference and jamming are both big issues, he said. “Spoofing” raises even greater concerns, he said. “The ability to masquerade as an authentic GPS signal and intentionally then walk receivers off of what they thought was a known, good location -- we know that that has been employed in areas around the world.” Where GPS is essential, such as the timing in LTE networks “we need to take some steps to harden ourselves against it,” he said.
Public safety also relies on GPS for emergency response, especially for tracking first responders, Simpson said. If you're a terrorist why wouldn’t you “amplify” an attack “with a little bit of additional confusion?” he asked. As FirstNet, the national network for first responders, is deployed it will need “accurate timing for very high data rates,” he said. “That too could become a vulnerability."
Steve Koenig, director-industry analysis at CEA, said GPS has been a “game-changing” technology. Koenig offered a tutorial, noting that GPS is now critical to surveying, precision agriculture, aviation, shipping on the seas and rail safety (http://bit.ly/1lGD30l). The growing location-based services market is dependent on GPS, he said. Driverless cars also depend on GPS, Koenig noted. While that market is extremely small today it “will without doubt have an impact on all our lives and will really change the nature of transportation in the decades to come,” he said.
GPS touches everyone’s life on a daily basis and is a “cornerstone” of the economy, said Rob Crane, an adviser to the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing. “It touches our communications networks, our wireless signals, our financial transactions, construction, operations of the intermodal transportation systems, the massive grids that power our nation."
Many don’t understand that GPS is ultimately provided by the Department of Defense, said Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, deputy chief information officer at DOD. That has been the case since 1983 when President Ronald Reagan made GPS available for civilian use, he said. A recent DOD study estimated that GPS contributes as much $122 billion a year to the U.S. economy, Wheeler said. U.S. GPS is “the gold standard” for the rest of the world, he said.