SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day:
Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems.
Now, one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have—whether it's due to a severe space weather event or "nefarious activity by a bad actor." The study was sponsored by the US government's National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International.
[...] In the case of some adverse event leading to a widespread outage, the study estimates that the loss of GPS service would have a $1 billion per-day impact, although the authors acknowledge this is at best a rough estimate. It would likely be higher during the planting season of April and May, when farmers are highly reliant on GPS technology for information about their fields.
[...] "GPS came along at a time of significant evolution in the telecom sector and played a critical role in the digitization of telecom infrastructure and the advent of wireless technology," the study states. "Wireless technology continues to evolve in ways that increase its reliance on highly precise timing, which in turn increases reliance on GPS. Multiple technological trends—from autonomous cars to the internet of things—will be stretching wireless technology to new limits in the coming years."
The study is likely to increase public calls for improved safety and security of the US GPS system, which the Air Force continues to modernize with its new fleet of GPS III satellites. The first of these new satellites, offering positioning and timing information with three times better accuracy and heightened anti-jamming capabilities, launched on a Falcon 9 rocket in December.
That's about $275,000 per minute or $11,500 per second.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 17 2019, @12:57PM (21 children)
It's within living memory that we used paper maps. Most people working out there today started off that way, and would remember how to do it in the event of a GPS outage.
Professional drivers tend to remember the routes they drive. Farmers tend to remember the fields they tend every day. If GPS goes out, they'll manage.
The one thing I would never do without GPS is enter the state of New Jersey, but even with GPS "Never, ever leave the freeway in Jersey" is our rule of thumb already. That aside, GPS is useful, but not essential.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @01:21PM (1 child)
GPS is more than car navigation systems.
FTFA:
(Score: 2) by J_Darnley on Monday June 17 2019, @07:47PM
Oh no! The government's tracking devices will stop giving people their circuses leading to fewer people carrying them.
I can only hope that a GPS outage comes sooner rather than later.
(Score: 1) by doke on Monday June 17 2019, @01:26PM (7 children)
The article mentions telecommunications timing. Most long-haul communications use time division technologies, ie sonet. They require a stable frequency reference, called a "clock" signal, so that the sender and receiver can correctly break up the bit stream at the right intervals. The best references are atomic clocks, but they're expensive, and subject to a lot of regulations. Many places use GPS as a frequency reference. Without a GPS signal, they stop being able to send and receive information. The big carriers' cores would be "mostly" unaffected, because they have the legal clout and money for atomic clocks. However, a lot of the peripheral networks would drift out of sync, accumulate unacceptable error levels, and stop passing data. I havn't worked with them, but I understand mobile cell phone towers are also very timing sensitive.
https://www.orolia.com/products-services/precision-timing/epsilon-gps-clock [orolia.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 17 2019, @02:06PM (5 children)
That's news to me. I'm very familiar with ham radio operators using Rb atomic clocks to regulate microwave radio gear for serious hobby purposes. On ebay, Rb pulls are like $200, Ce pulls are like $2K. No NRC/AEC/EPA involvement. Technically the worst federal interference is likely the FCC not thinking its funny to operate a class A certified EMI device in a class B environment (LOL this is a lame, yet true-ish, joke). I bet the EPA and security theatre infrastructure would be pissed if I cracked a Ce oscilator open and threw it into a body of water, sodium explosion style (or maybe there's not enough Ce in there to make a bang)
Personally I have an off brand ovenized TXCO attached to a GPS in my basement connected to my frequency counter, RF synth, and fancy spectrum analyzer for accuracy. The ovenized TXCO has a very low error rate but not zero and over a long term the GPS slowly disciplines it to an average error rate of zero. I also have a cheap(ish) 10 MHz filtered distribution amp. There's also an external GPS antenna stuck in a window. The works cost maybe $200 (cheap compared to my $2K spectrum analyzer it connects to....) and would maybe fit in a shoebox. I can discipline a SDR off it (long story) and watching MW AM broadcasters I can tell who's taking freq stability more seriously and who's drifting (within FCC specs) and that's the most accuracy I can test. I also know I'm within "less than 1 Hz" of WWV accuracy (using the guitar tuner technique, which isn't really all that good even ideally) which also takes a hit due to ionospheric sky wave stuff. Anyway just saying I can mostly verify it works better than I have the tech to verify which is pretty good.
Atomic clocks give "instant" stability in like five minutes of power and they MOSTLY don't care about temp so they are idea for mobile or short term use. My GPS disciplined system doesn't even begin to settle down for like one day of being powered up although it does eventually settle down to essentially 0 error and 0 drift for all practical EE purposes. Technically ground based telecom stuff doesn't need instant on, who flips the -48VDC power bus on and off for fun, LOL?
There are killer problems with flipping the switch on GPS. One is the main way to do it in a practical sense is WW3 nuclear warfare and end of civilization EMP strikes where my main concern would not be the accuracy of my frequency counter in my basement lab. Also my former employer's SONET ring sites would be a cloud of radioactive vapor in a post WWIII scenario so they have nothing to worry about either. The next problem is the classic EMP logistical scaling problem of yes one dude can buy a Rb oscillator pull for $200 or a new one for $5K but the logistics train can't do that for an entire international telecommunications system in less than a couple years, maybe.
I took a correspondence course on a US Army calibration stack that used (from quarter century old memory) WWVB to discipline a local crystal oscillator. Again, one dude can whip that up using ebay junk for a magazine article, but logistically you can't roll that out to an entire civilization in a weekend.
Note that for phase noise reasons and stuff, the EE stuff isn't as simple as take a Ce Rb GPS or whatevs, signal and PLL divide it down to something usable and call it good, usually you end up disciplining a low noise crystal oscillator over a long period of time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @02:32PM (1 child)
Ignoring practical difficulties for a moment...
While Cesium is more reactive and releases more energy per atom in such an explosion, sodium will release more energy per kilogram simply because there are far, far more sodium atoms in a kilogram of sodium than there are cesium atoms in a kilogram of cesium.
And you can easily purchase sodium by the kilogram without anybody caring; sodium metal costs about $20/kg versus cesium metal which costs several thousand times more. Nobody is going to care about you blowing up tiny amounts of cesium in water.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @07:24PM
Ce is cerium. Caesium is Cs.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday June 17 2019, @08:25PM (1 child)
Dude, that really is serious hobby purposes. In my ham radio days I used to use WWV for setting the shack timepiece. You’ve taken that to a whole new dimension!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 28 2019, @11:21AM
In "the old days" that setup would have cost $1000 back when I was poor, so now that I'm not, and I just checked ebay and GPSDO kits are available from $90, its kinda hard to resist. Distribution amps seem to run about $100.
There's no point in owning a nice spectrum analyzer with tracking filter if there's nothing connected to the 10 Mhz input... ditto my frequency counter, DDS RF/function generator, etc.
(Score: 1) by doke on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:31AM
Wow. That's a heck of a home setup. I'm very impressed.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday June 17 2019, @03:07PM
SONET is mostly replaced by OTN for long haul nowadays, partly because of the problems you describe. Every piece of SONET gear on the network had to be frequency locked to single frequency reference. Differences in phase that could move around over time (low frequency jitter) could be absorbed by the protocol, but any long term mismatch in average frequency would cause the equivalent of a bit overrun or underrun at the mismatched interface. Loss of a timing reference would eventually create this problem, and it would get worse over time as local oscillators drifted and made the frequency error bigger.
At Little Big Telco we had one of those satellite feeds for SONET timing in the lab, called a BITS clock. It may have come from the GPS hierarchy like you say, but I don’t remember. Many nodes in the public SONET network didn’t get BITS clock, they recovered timing through the network from a peer data interface via PLLs, but if you cascaded too many of these, you wound up with too much jitter.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @01:33PM (1 child)
GPS or no, it's best not to enter the state of New Jersey regardless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @03:17PM
Only thing wrong with Jersey is New Yorkers. They ruin everything.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Monday June 17 2019, @02:03PM
This is true.
But if we rely on it, whether or not it's "essential", then there is a cost involved in it not working, or not being reliable. A loss of investment, slower ways to do things, less accuracy, etc. etc.
It's not that all of a sudden a $1bn bill lands on our doorstep if we turn it off... but all the little things that are "helped" by having GPS (timing, location, etc.) are suddenly more inconvenient, which costs time and therefore money.
We can go back to using pen, paper, clockwork and astrolabes. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't cost billions to do so. Just shipping alone would be so much more lost that it would cost you a fortune just in the fuel to power them.
Worldwide, $1bn is not a lot. That's 1/7th of a dollar a day per person. Even at minimum wage, that's a tiny amount of time and inconvenience. And yet not having GPS could easily add ten minutes to your daily commute just through traffic control alone and "cost" you more than that. It's not blown out of proportion, it's not the apocalypse, but it would cost to be without it - at least until some equivalent alternative took over.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday June 17 2019, @07:00PM (6 children)
The best thing you can see from New Jersey is the Pennsylvania side of the Deleware Water gap.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:15AM (5 children)
Haha the Pennsylvania State Welcome Center on the PA side of the river is hallowed ground for my family's road trips West. I make them hold it until we get there.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:33PM (4 children)
I stopped at the one in Matamoras at the north end of the DWG on a return trip from New York this year. It allowed my trip to avoid New Jersey entirely, and was a very scenic drive. It was one of the nicest Welcome Centers I have been to.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:06PM (3 children)
Interesting--never been through that way. How much time did that route add to your trip, or do you live North in Westchester or the Bronx?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:01PM (2 children)
Well I don't live there but, I was travelling from across the Tapan Zee bridge to Altoona. Usually I go from I287 to I80 or I76. Instead I did I87 north to US6 and I84.
I stopped at Dingman's Ferry to view the falls for a while, so I don't know how much longer it took. But not on a weekend the US209 through the DWG seemed not very busy, though it is a 2 lane road mostly. Also there was a wreck somewhere on I80 (of course) so that ruined everything. Google Maps suggested it was a 30 minute detour, but who knows how accurate that is.
If you were going from New York City itself, I can imagine it would be a major detour.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)
You're right it's probably not worth the detour from NYC, but I do occasionally take the Tappan Zee when starting in Long Island so I appreciate having your option in my back pocket. Thanks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday June 21 2019, @01:16PM
Anything to avoid driving on I80 or the PA Turnpike. :) Enjoy.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 17 2019, @08:24PM
$1B per day is $2.85 per person per day in the US, is it because people can't find Starbucks without their GPS?
🌻🌻 [google.com]