In an age where technology is the backbone of our infrastructure, the fragility of GPS has become a growing concern. GPS underpins 17 critical industries across the United States, from telecommunications and energy distribution to transportation and finance. As Patrick Diamond, principal at Diamond Consulting, emphasized during a recent webinar, “We don’t have a backup for our GPS system, but our adversaries have backups for theirs.” This stark reality highlights the urgent need for alternatives to ensure the security and reliability of our nation’s critical infrastructure.
The Broadcast Positioning System (BPS™), invented by NAB, represents a powerful and resilient solution to this challenge. BPS uses the ATSC 3.0 standard to embed precise time markers into television broadcasts, offering a terrestrial alternative to satellite-based systems. By leveraging the robust infrastructure of local television stations, BPS provides reliable timing and positioning signals while remaining compatible with other broadcast services.
The vulnerabilities of GPS make the need for BPS undeniable. Dr. Jeff Sherman, supervisory physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explained, “Unfortunately, it’s become very clear that there are vulnerabilities of relying on GPS or generally GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems). Because of its ubiquity, GPS has been adopted in many critical industries from telecommunications, energy distribution, transportation sector and finance, but the reality is that GPS and GNSS signals are unfortunately very weak when received at Earth’s surface and that makes them trivially jammable, even by accident.”
Sherman added, “A study was done commissioned by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) that determined that a 30-day outage of GPS would result in something like $1 billion of day loss to the U.S. economy, 50% of which alone is in the telecommunication sector. So clearly GPS and GNSS have found a niche use in a lot of critical industries, but the need for alternatives is growing in awareness.”
Sherman also described BPS as a practical and highly resilient alternative, noting, “The greatest strength, though, is that the transmission infrastructure is already built and being operated by television broadcasters across the country at very high radiated power with large tailored coverage area, and the propagation mode is largely line of sight, which is excellent for a time or position system, because of the high power, it is very impractical to imagine jamming or spoofing television transmissions over a wide area.”
Broadcasters are uniquely equipped to deliver this service. Brett Jenkins, executive vice president and chief technology and digital officer at Nexstar Media Group, said, “Broadcasters setting up a system that would potentially be a timing source as a sort of resilient backup to a GPS, you start thinking about all the industries that rely on GPS that rely on the GPS timing source. And the fragility of that infrastructure. It just seemed like a natural place where broadcasters could provide a service, which at the end of the day, that’s really in broadcasters’ DNA.”
BPS integrates seamlessly into the existing ATSC 3.0 broadcast infrastructure, requiring minimal overhead and offering significant public service potential. Harvey Arnold, senior vice president of Engineering at Sinclair Broadcast Group, described the resilience and reliability of broadcast infrastructure, saying, “Broadcasting has always been, it’s got to be there for emergencies. It’s got to be there all the time. We design transmission facilities and towers and transmitters in general for our redundancy. We have emergency generators. So, it’s all there that we very, very seldom go down during any type of an event, in hurricane or whatever. It’s resilient and we pride ourselves, the broadcasting community prides themselves to be there all the time.”
As broadcasters, we take pride in our role as a trusted backbone for critical communication. BPS allows us to expand that service by addressing the vulnerabilities of GPS and providing a “before the fact” solution to prevent disruptions. When I think about the words of Dr. Brad Parkinson, the inventor of GPS, who said that people often don’t realize how much critical infrastructure relies on GPS timing, I see an incredible opportunity for broadcasters to step up. With BPS, we’re not just reacting to emergencies – we’re helping to prevent them.
Learn more at nab.org/BPS.
