GPS technology was first conceived by the US military in the 1970s and is made up of around 30 satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth. Today, it is used by billions of smartphone users as well as cars, aircraft and the world’s militaries.
Yet there has been a rise in scrambled and “spoofed” GPS signals across the world, with glitches across Poland and the Balkans blamed on Russia’s electronic warfare.
In March, an RAF plane carrying Grant Shapps, then defence secretary, experienced GPS jamming while flying close to Russian territory. While the incident did not interfere with the safety of the RAF jet, sources said similar events put “unnecessary risk on civilian aircraft”.
Commercial aircraft have little protection against GPS jamming, aside from relying on a pilot’s wits and navigation experience, although it rarely puts flights in danger.
Now, private technology companies are considering developing alternatives. Amazon had already planned to launch 3,000 communications satellites under a programme spearheaded by Bezos in 2019.
But analysts at Quilty Space identified a job posting that hinted at Amazon’s plans to use these satellites to provide a “GPS alternative” to “diversify revenue”.
The job listing said the engineer would “support conceptual design” for a position, navigation and timing (PNT) system, while another Amazon executive posted online “advanced PNT solutions are on our roadmap”.
Chris McLaughlin, government affairs chief at Airbus-backed Aalto Haps and a former executive at Inmarsat and OneWeb, said rising threats from Russia, China and Iran meant “there is increasing pressure to find resilient ways to secure positioning, navigation and timing”.
The Israel-Hamas war has also added to a wave of GPS jamming across the Middle East.
McLaughlin said: “The aim now is to find new ways to give resilience in GPS-denied areas. Among those ways are to look at low-Earth-orbit satellites. I would be surprised if they [Amazon] are not looking at it.”
Amazon is planning to launch thousands of satellites that will orbit 500km above the Earth, bringing it into competition with Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX operates the Starlink satellite network.
Britain has previously considered developing its own alternative to GPS. It was part of the European Union’s rival Galileo programme prior to Brexit.
Officials have since then repeatedly considered a sovereign system, although they have not committed to one.
A 2017 report found a mass GPS blackout would cost the UK £1b per day.
