GPS Declassified

by Richard D. Easton

  Google meanwhile promoted its Android software platform to third-party developers. The Android market by late 2009 offered about twelve thousand apps, compared to Apple’s then roughly one hundred thousand apps.122 With the iPhone (still exclusive to AT&T) gaining market share and luring away existing Verizon customers, competitors fought back. In October 2009 Google unveiled free voice-prompted, turn-by-turn navigation for Android users. For Google, offering free navigation was a way to increase mobile search traffic; phone manufacturers and wireless carriers saw an opportunity to sell more phones. Motorola and Verizon immediately announced the Droid, the first Android-based smartphone to run on the biggest U.S. wireless carrier. The news sent shares of Garmin and TomTom tumbling as analysts considered the implications for PNDs.123 Three months later Finland’s Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, began bundling free navigation with its phones as part of a strategy to compete with Apple’s iPhone. Nokia had spent $8.1 billion the previous year acquiring digital mapmaker Navteq and had sold about eighty-three million smartphones with GPS to that point.124 An automotive industry analyst called it “another nail in the coffin for PND makers. ”125 While diversified PND makers survived, PNDs today are a much smaller product category—a market that ABI Research predicts will decline by 40 percent by 2016.126

  The rise of smartphones signaled a new era of “connected cars ,” in which drivers can transfer into vehicles the online services available on their phones—a large portion of which require GPS to provide location-based results. By 2010 more than 80 percent of mobile phones and nearly 100 percent of smartphones sold worldwide had Bluetooth wireless connectivity.127 In the United States 93 percent of model year 2010 vehicles offered Bluetooth as a standard or optional accessory, and 75 percent of models in Western Europe offered it.128 By mid-2011 about 72.5 million U.S. consumers owned smartphones, and the seven hundred million smartphones in use worldwide represented about 15 percent of all mobile phones.129 The market research firm Forrester predicted that by 2013 mobile phones would become the most common method of personal navigation as people relied on the device they always have with them—their phone. That prediction was too conservative; the number of navigation-enabled mobile phones doubled in 2011 to an estimated 130 million worldwide, putting them in striking distance of the 150 million PNDs then in use.130 This represents a massive change over less than a decade in the way a significant portion of all people find their way around in daily life. So, how did phones get GPS capability in the first place?

  Civilian Search and Rescue

  With mobile phones came the first wireless 911 calls, which proved invaluable for emergencies like automobile accidents, where landline telephones might be far away. By 1994 U.S. cellular networks handled about a half-million 911 calls each month, and the number of cell phone users was growing 48 percent annually.131 As cell phones and wireless 911 calls proliferated, problems became apparent. Unlike the situation with wired phones at fixed addresses, 911 call centers could not automatically identify a wireless caller’s number and location. And unlike downed pilot Scott O’Grady, who knew his location but could not reach rescuers with his radio, an estimated one-quarter of mobile 911 callers who reached an operator could not provide their location—hikers lost in the woods, for instance, or injured car crash victims unable to speak.132 Worse, callers sometimes could not even connect to a 911 operator if they were outside their own cellular network.

  Public safety organizations urged the Federal Communications Commission to require that wireless providers install technology to identify the location of a mobile 911 caller. They worried that increasing cell phone use would render call-center infrastructure obsolete, putting lives and property at greater risk. Wireless industry groups questioned the technical feasibility and called mandates and compliance dates “undue burdens ” that would hurt their industry and the economy.133 Estimates of the cost to implement the enhanced 911, or E-911, requirements ranged from $550 million to $7 billion.134 In June 1996, after forging an agreement between public safety organizations and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), the FCC gave all wireless carriers one year to begin transmitting out-of-network 911 calls and a year and a half to provide 911 dispatchers with the wireless caller’s phone number and nearest cell tower.135 Within five years wireless carriers were required to develop ways to give emergency operators the caller’s location within a roughly four-hundred-foot radius at least two-thirds of the time.136 To cover upgrades at local 911 call centers, most states levied taxes—the familiar E-911 surcharge that appears on phone bills.

  Two main alternatives emerged for complying with the E-911 mandate; both were early-stage technologies far from being ready to deploy. One method, known as radio triangulation, calculated a caller’s position based on the slightly different times the phone’s signal arrived at three network antennas. The other approach required adding GPS receivers to individual handsets. The triangulation method concentrated costs on the network infrastructure, while the GPS solution shifted most of the costs to the handset.137 Triangulation worked better in “urban canyons ,” where tall buildings block GPS signals; GPS worked better in rural areas with fewer cellular antennas. However, GPS posed an additional drain on the phone’s battery and required more time to phase new phones into the subscriber base.138

  By this point GPS receivers had been shrunk to postage-stamp-size integrated circuits—silicon chipsets combining radio frequency receiver functions and central processing units for GPS signals. GPS chipmakers embraced the E-911 mandate as an opportunity to sell their technology to phone manufacturers. SiRF Technology Holdings, founded in 1995 by a former Intel executive and based in Santa Clara, California, announced soon after the FCC decision that it had developed advanced GPS chipsets that could more quickly acquire even weak satellite signals while filtering out error-causing multipath (reflected) signals.139 SiRF turned its attention to reducing power consumption and within two years found a way to cut it significantly, enhancing GPS suitability for mobile devices.140 In what one industry analyst called “a huge coup ” for the three-year-old company, on August 10, 1998, SiRF announced deals with wireless market leader Nokia, phone maker Ericsson of Sweden, and the American division of Japanese microelectronics giant Hitachi.141 Nokia invested $3 million in the company, while Ericsson and Hitachi licensed SiRF’s technology.142 SiRF became for a time the largest supplier of GPS chips for computers, PNDs, and cell phones. Other competitors joined the action, targeting what became a $270 million market for GPS integrated circuits by 2000, forecast at the time to grow to $1.2 billion by 2005.143 Qualcomm, a San Diego–based phone maker that was shifting its focus to wireless semiconductors, purchased SnapTrack, a SiRF rival, in January 2000 for $1 billion in stock and within a few years became a serious challenger to Nokia in the worldwide market for wireless chips.144 SnapTrack developed a hybrid location method that combined GPS in the handset with proprietary software in network computer servers. Other companies, including SiRF, Motorola, and Global Locate, developed variants of this “assisted GPS ” approach in which wireless network servers send signals to the phone that compensate for weak or lost GPS signals indoors.145

  The expansion of the privately held Global Locate illustrates how smaller GPS developers could rapidly grow through licensing. In 2004 Global Locate licensed its GPS chip technology to Infineon Technologies of Germany for a small fee per chip, and over the next five years Infineon sold eighty million of the chips worldwide, including those in the iPhone 3G.146 As the GPS semiconductor industry matured, the integration of GPS with other functions, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, on a single chip became the norm.147 This precipitated the larger dominant semiconductor players acquiring the GPS-only chipmakers. Broadcom, a diversified public company based in Irvine, California, with a $15 billion market capitalization, bought Global Locate in 2007 for $226 million.148 UK-based Bluetooth maker CSR bought SiRF in 2009 for $136 million.149 By 2010 Broadcom overtook CSR/SiRF as the leadin
g GPS chip supplier after Apple chose its Global Locate–based chips (no longer licensed to Infineon) for the iPhone 4 and iPad.150 In 2012 Korean electronics giant Samsung, a major Apple rival, bought CSR’s handset connectivity and GPS semiconductor division for $310 million. Today GPS, used for both location and precise timing, is literally at the heart of the integrated circuitry powering many consumer electronic devices, and the design and manufacture of GPS chipsets is a strategic battleground in the broader electronics industry.151

  Meeting the FCC’s E-911 mandate proved to be a complicated affair—one with moving targets and deadlines. It became clear that wireless carriers could not comply with the original 2001 deadline. Network-based solutions still lacked the required accuracy; handset-based solutions required more time to get new phones into customers’ hands. After SnapTrack announced in 1999 that its GPS technology could locate wireless callers to within 160 feet, the FCC gave wireless carriers the option of meeting that new accuracy level by 2003 or choosing a network solution with a 330-foot accuracy level by 2001.152 When October 1, 2001, arrived industry-wide progress lagged so much that the FCC had little choice but to issue waivers. The agency extended the 2003 deadline to December 31, 2005, but raised the required portion of subscriber handsets with tracking ability to 95 percent. By 2006 most carriers that chose network-based solutions, such as Cingular and T-Mobile, were in compliance but those that chose the GPS-handset approach, including Verizon, were not because too few customers had upgraded their phones.153 Mergers brought more complications. Sprint was in compliance until it acquired Nextel, whose customer base had older phones.154 Industry analysts attributed wireless carriers’ intense marketing efforts touting new features and offering rebates and prizes as partly driven by efforts to meet the FCC mandate.155 The promotions raised consumer awareness of the benefits that GPS and location-based services brought to mobile phones and sparked entrepreneurs to envision new applications. In any case, consumers have the FCC and public safety agencies to thank in part for the amazing array of GPS apps that are available for their smartphones—as well as for the fact that their daily movements may now be tracked via the same technology (see chapter 9). As the first decade of the twenty-first century ended, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 vision of a satellite-based worldwide network where “no-one on the planet need ever get lost or become out of touch with the community ” was reality.

  Time for Anxiety

  One further illustration of how GPS evolved hand in hand with the digital revolution seems amusing in retrospect, but the anxiety was real at the time. As the year 2000 approached fears spread about the so-called millennium bug or Y2K computer problem—system failures caused by software with the year coded in only two digits. Computer programmers shortened years to two digits in the 1950s, when digital memory was scarce and expensive. The custom persisted. Unknown effects of such programs rolling over from “99 ” to “00 ,” making 2000 indistinguishable from 1900, threatened not only mainframe networks but also personal computers and countless devices with embedded computer chips. Predictions ranged from the inconvenient—stalled cars, stuck elevators, and power blackouts—to the apocalyptic—chaos in the streets, planes falling from the sky, and nuclear missiles launching themselves.156 Governments and corporations spent more than $250 billion worldwide on software and hardware fixes in the last few years leading up to the rollover.157

  In this charged environment, news reports trumpeted a similar but unrelated potential problem for GPS receivers at midnight on August 21–22, 1999. “Coming Satellite Adjustment a Y2K ‘Dress Rehearsal ,” ” announced the Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada).158 “GPS Users May Want to Dust Off Compasses ,” advised the Washington Times.159 “Date Flaw Could Sink Navigation Systems ,” warned Computing magazine.160 However, the GPS “end-of-week ” rollover was neither a flaw nor unexpected; it is an integral part of the way GPS marks time. GPS does not operate on a 365-day year. The largest unit of time in the GPS system is one week, or 604,800 seconds.161 Starting at week zero, the first one pegged initially to midnight (Greenwich mean time), January 5–6, 1980, the system operates for 1,024 weeks, about twenty years, and then rolls over like an odometer to week zero again. This provides a continuous time scale, unlike Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), maintained by the U.S. Naval Observatory, which periodically adds leap seconds to adjust for the earth’s rotation in the same way that leap years adjust the calendar for the earth’s orbit. There is nothing significant about the 1,024-week cycle. It results from the scheme used to represent each week in ten-digit binary code—zeros and ones—in the stream of digital signals GPS satellites transmit to receivers.162 In a ten-digit sequence the number of unique combinations of zeroes and ones is 1,024—two raised to the tenth power (210).

  The rollover had no effect on the GPS satellites themselves but put at risk receivers built before 1993, when manufacturers adopted new specifications designed to accommodate it.163 Nevertheless, GPS hardware makers, which analysts estimated to make up a $4.4 billion industry in 1998, perceived significant liability issues and issued public warnings.164 Trimble Navigation warned consumers on its website to avoid using GPS devices during the week before the rollover, calling such use “potentially hazardous. ”165 Federal agencies from the Department of Transportation to the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued advisories referring consumers to the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center’s website or a toll-free Y2K hotline (888-USA-4Y2K, later acquired by a savvy telemarketer) for inquiries about devices or manufacturers.166 Canadian government agencies also launched awareness campaigns, and on the eve of the rollover, the Canadian Coast Guard had sixty search-and-rescue vessels on standby to help stranded boaters.167 Dar Moja, the only GPS seller in Saudi Arabia, offered free software upgrades to the five thousand customers in the kingdom it had identified as having older units.168

  Ultimately the rollover caused no serious problems. A spokesman at the U.S. Air Force Y2K Fusion Center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama termed it a “non-event ” and reported fewer than twenty calls.169 A Coast Guard spokesman reported less than a dozen malfunctions among several thousand receivers on its boats, aircraft, and vehicles, and all but one of those reset itself.170 Rockwell Collins received no reports of malfunctions among the two hundred thousand military units in the field.171 One Australian naval patrol boat crew saw their GPS receiver fail.172 The most trouble occurred in Japan, where consumers were early adopters of electronic products. Thousands of complaints poured in about blank or frozen car navigation screens, and estimates put the number of device failures at one hundred thousand.173 Pioneer Electronics alone sold 270,000 navigation units between 1992 and 1996, but about a quarter of them were not replaced or upgraded in time.174 American drivers started buying automobile navigation systems later, and Ford and General Motors officials confirmed that there were no problems with the newer equipment.175

  Four months after the GPS and Y2K rollover worries passed came the official act that GPS manufacturers and users had long awaited—President Clinton signed an order permanently turning off Selective Availability on May 1, 2000.176 In announcing the decision he noted that modernization plans included adding two new civilian signals as replacement satellites were launched, and he reiterated the commitment to provide GPS free of charge. If the 1996 presidential directive announcing the government’s intention to take these steps acted as a sort of starting gun in the race to commercialize GPS, the fulfillment of signals up to ten times more accurate shifted private development into high gear, as shown by the amazing growth of the GPS industry over the first decade of the new millennium.