Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days The multibillion-euro navigation system Galileo went dark over the weekend. Things began to wobble last Thursday, 11 July, as the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (EGSA) issued an advisory at 14:45 UTC warning of "service degradation". At the time, sat-nav mag Inside GNSS reported that sources within the …
Actually Germany, Italy, and Spain (taken over from the UK from the 1st of March).
It's nice to know that they were "notified within a matter of seconds" when something went wrong.
A suspicious mind would notice lots of very odd happenings in the world of tech at the moment.
Cloudflare worldwide downtime.
Galileo knocked offline.
New York blackouts.
All, while not unprecedented, certainly unusual, and all happening in little brief window in 2019. Even Google GSuite threw a wobbly not long ago and all its services were out for much of the world.
A suspicious mind would say... oh look... cybersecurity... someone gently probing to see the extent they can cause hassle, should they decide to. All "explained" of course, all "internal" causes (but who's to say that the best way to do these things isn't to do them from the inside or make them look like that's where they came from?).
In a world where the US is snubbing China, cosying up to Russia, and pushing away Europe, who's to say what's actually happening.
If nothing else, it should make us think... if three things can all be caused by a slight glitch in the IT... what could a hostile nation state actually achieve if it wanted to?
Failures of these sorts are vital since they cause providers to exercise their recovery procedures and they cause users to exercise their mitigation, fallback and recovery procedures. Absent randomly occurring failures at some reasonable frequency society would build itself up for real catastrophic failures.
When a tiny regex is capable of taking down a huge chunk of the world's websites (mainly because someone turned off the CPU-limits on queries, I believe!), or a small BGP announcement capable of rerouting vast portions of the Internet through Russia or China, or one timing station capable of taking down an entire global satellite network for days at a time...
I don't think we're learning those lessons. This is kind of my point. We are highlighting the sheer fragility of these things that we're basing our daily existence on, where a slip of a key results in downtime for billions of people. There's no way that we're then in any way learning if they keep happening (e.g. Cloudflare has gone down a few times, BGP outages are still happening all over), and that's not even when someone with actual hostile intent is *trying* to do something.
We're seriously too vulnerable for this kind of thing to be possible and not be immediately rolled back to some kind of "fallback" state from 10 minutes before it all goes titsup.
The precursor to the weapons is going to be completely crippling the Internet to prevent assistance / warning, not to mention that that could well be the method of attack itself (e.g. SCADA controls like we did to Iran?)... The bombs you can't stop. But if they are able to stop you retaliating in any significant fashion because a) you don't know and b) they can use the same attacks against your systems so you can't retaliate at all, then it's not nuclear winter you need be afraid of. It's someone literally walking into your country, annexing it, and nobody being any the wiser until the digital dust settles by which time it's too late.
Absolutely. As a species we don't seem to be very good at risk management/minimisation. The original theory of the Internet (if a bit is bust it routes round it) seems to have gone out of the window a long time ago. Same with many other areas - power generation? Much more resilient to have lots of small sources rather than one mega one. Potentially the same with transport - one key failure in a centralised traffic light system and a city grinds to a halt.
By all means put things in a 'Cloud', but a Cloud made up of multiple chunks that do not depend on each other. It shouldn't be possible for Cloudflare, or GMail, or GSuite or whatever to 'break' globally.
Do you have any specific data to back that up? We seem to be surviving in droves, despite the constant rain of failing equipment and technology. Oh wait. That's not happening, despite the increasing complexity of the world we live in.
I suspect that since we started rubbing sticks together to make fire, someone has been lamenting the impending doom almost guaranteed by the new-fangled complexities.
Or worse, how easily can cyber security professionals differentiate between accidents, bugs or design flaws and the actions of a hostile adversary?
You can imagine scenarios where a genuine bug is micharacterised as a cyber attack by an opposing nation, leading to escalating retaliations and we're back to the 1960/70s.
"Could it be a squirrel?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_disruptions_caused_by_squirrels
Yes. Yes it could be.
Of course squirrels are just the posterchild for "innocent explanations for outages" to go with "software update went wrong" and "clustered network switch unexpected failure mode".
See also "the SAN shat the bed". Not sure if that one's got itr's own Wikipedia article though.
Jacob Rees-Mogg and his chums will be replacing this foreign shambles with an all-old British design.
Fabricated from bronze, alabaster and Bakelite by artisans from the Midlands, the new Blighty satellite constellation will be the wonder of the world.
Clockwork receivers will churn out your position in OS co-ordinates, height above sea-level and GMT as well as direction to nearest open Public House.
Clockwork receivers can also be used with a sextant as a back-up.
God Bless Britannia.
"Alternatively just how do you manage to set up a geostationary satellite that hovers directly over Birmingham?"
Tundra orbits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra_orbit
A figure 8 pattern in the sky is possible if you're not fussed about it remaining at a constant altitude - the Japanese do it with their QZSS satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System
The Sirius radio satellites over North America do the same sort of thing.
"The idea of using atomic transitions to measure time was suggested by Lord Kelvin in 1879.[3] Magnetic resonance, developed in the 1930s by Isidor Rabi, became the practical method for doing this.[4] In 1945, Rabi first publicly suggested that atomic beam magnetic resonance might be used as the basis of a clock.[5] The first atomic clock was an ammonia absorption line device at 23870.1 MHz built in 1949 at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards "
Isidor Rabi was American too.
"And it will cost the same as Galileo, but we don't get to split the bill with 27 other countries."
It'd probably cost more, because I wouldn't trust the UK government to run any project competently.
But the development work on the clocks has already been done in Blighty. That was hugely expensive and the one genuinely new bit of development needed. The rest of it's fairly ordinary space-going radio gear on what might as well be a standard satellite bus plus the usual space-hardened computer to run the fancy stuff - but they get more capable and/or cheaper with every passing year.
So it *ought* to cost less, what with all that and cheaper launches now being available thanks to SpaceX et al., at least when compared to the first Galileo launches.
It wouldn't, though, would it? :-/
Interestingly, Britain could enlist the assistance of the European Space Agency in establishing an alternative to Galileo. Although ESA handles Galileo procurements for GSA and the EC, ESA is not an EU organisation and Britain will remain a member of ESA after Brexit. If the UK came along with some funding, ESA would be happy to help - in part, to signal their independence from the EC, who have annoyed ESA by talking of expanding the role of the GSA beyond satellite navigation.
I would suggest AC to read up on ESA and Galileo.
Galileo was wholly taken over by the EU as the private industry did not take part as much as was hoped for.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is an intergovernmental organisation of 22 member states[6] dedicated to the exploration of space. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, France,
EU and the European Space Agency
The political perspective of the European Union (EU) was to make ESA an agency of the EU by 2014,[70] although this date was not met. The EU is already the largest single donor to ESA's budget and non-ESA EU states are observers at ESA.
The contribution (2019) to ESA apart from the EU budget from member states.
Mill E Contr.%
France 1,174.4 28.1%
Germany 927.1 22.2%
Italy 420.2 10.1%
UK 369.6 8.8%
Spain 201.8 4.8%
Belgium 191.4 4.6%
.......
This corresponds fairly well with the size of this industry in those countries.
I have no doubt every European country would be able to build a system for themselves as it's all about only time and money but I doubt anybody will, and that goes for Britain too, as it's obvious that the balance between time and money and on the other hand status and advantages will lean strongly towards lunacy.
Then again, if the wonder kid from Eton who never grew up and lives on belief becomes the PM then all odds are off.
PS. Why would ESA like to build a competing system to Galileo, such rubbish.
A lot of the tech for Galileo (especially the crypto) was British anyway. If we want to build something, we certainly can. It's more a matter of whether we should bother on the basis that the money could be better spent elsewhere....
It's not the expertise, it's the implementation. No one would question British expertise ingenuity and engineering, it's British management that would mess it up.
Whatever happened to the Beagles on Mars anyway....
Jacob Rees-Mogg and his chums will be replacing this foreign shambles with an all-old British design.
The clocks on the Galileo satellites are British-designed already, and did not fail the way the Swiss(!) ones did in the early satellites.
The current outage is being blamed on the Precise Timing Facilities in the Fucino area, which manages the synchronization between the satellite clocks.
"No mention about it being designed in Britain."
No mention of anything at all unless javascript is enabled. We really need some technologically competent business to devise a language to convey marked-up data from websites to browser without all that extra overhead.
Morning and Evening Colours (not of those colors here!), precise around the world (well, not really). And a cross-check when the sun creeps over the yard-arm. https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/royal-navy-responsive/documents/reference-library/brd2/ch91.pdf)
6 bells for the tot of rum*
BTW where is the yard arm on an aircraft carrier?
half a pint, originally, of 57% Jamacan ! (truly a sad day in the 1970's) when that was abolished)
UK companies would be completely incapable to build and operate a satellite constellation guaranteeing less than 10 second per year outage, with global coverage.
[Checks facts. Oh right, Astrium Stevenage and Inmarsat have done exactly this for over forty years. At a cost of one-tenth Galileo to build a more complex geostationary constellation. Providing safety of life services to the global maritime fleet, among others]
Ok. Ok. The U.K. is “bad at commercialising technology”. The Germans just built it better and cheaper.
[Checks facts. Oh right. Surrey Satellites have *actually built* Galileo spacecraft in half the budget and one third the time of the selected German contractor OHB]
Check your facts before snarking Brexit prejudice.
E.g. the Galileo cockup is in the Precise Timing Facility co-located in the Fucino satellite station. The very same Fucino station owned and operated by the British company Inmarsat that has never had a single minute outage in decades.
If you checked your prejudice about Little Englanders, you would discover that U.K.-based Inmarsat employs staff from 174 out of 195 countries in the world, by mandate. Whereas the European Space Agency beacon of non-discrimination has the following typical job advertisement explicitly “prioritising” nationality to only 14 nationalities out of EU27.
https://career2.successfactors.eu/career?career%5fns=job%5flisting&company=esa&navBarLevel=JOB%5fSEARCH&rcm%5fsite%5flocale=en%5fGB&career_job_req_id=8790&selected_lang=en_GB&jobAlertController_jobAlertId=&jobAlertController_jobAlertName=&_s.crb=Gw3DdAi59Hvclz6SBt%2fy5e1Bi5k%3d
Is that a factor in this failure? Yes, I think it is. British tech companies are global teams in which to work. We are all comfortable with that and expect it. But an EU project in Fucino simply doesn’t employ the best engineers available for the project. They don’t have software testing running cost-effectively subcontracted in India. They don’t employ Chinese PhDs who learned their trade in Nokia Oulu, a couple of years in Kazakhstan, then a decade in Qualcomm San Diego. That’s what modern tech world looks like. The EU local politicised employment thing is just never going to be technically competitive, and hasn’t been already for a couple of decades.
Don't spoil a good jingoistic 'Little Europeaner' rant with actual facts...
Britain gave up an Empire as too hard and expensive to control, turning it into a commonwealth, way before the EU even got going.
EU is Just Empire Envy from the Germans and French who made a mess of theirs.
Brexit Britain isn't behind the curve, it's ahead of it.
Pretty much everyone was bankrupt after the world wars.
Only we also gave Germany plenty of support to rebuild - to rebuild with completely new and modern infrastructure...
One take on this is that Germany has been so successful in the years following the war (on a tech/engineering level at least) because they got to take all the knowledge up to that point, and start from scratch in producing new products, whereas being victorious, we had no help getting our economy back up and running, and still had all the constraints of prior industry.
For an example, imagine if our rail network had been destroyed. We would have had to rebuild, and might now have room for some of these larger trains in use in Europe today, instead of having the maximum size being restricted by the space beneath our bridges and inside our tunnels.
Though I have to say, we have a lot more surviving history than in Germany too, which I personally love.
Only we also gave Germany plenty of support to rebuild
No, that was America. And the UK received more in post-war Marshall aid than did Germany. Not a lot of people know that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
and to what extent did that compensate for the cost of re-paying Lend-Lease?
I seem to have touched a raw nerve.
Last time I checked, taking the mickey out of our politicians, institutions and national characteristics actually was one of our more endearing characteristics in the UK. Did you not see the memo?
Mentioning Walter the Softy does not have to relate to the B word does it?
Last place I worked could only muster 167 nationalities in its workforce, but this not that unusual these days with multi-national tech companies. I would guess that someone like Intelsat would have a similarly diverse workforce.
We remain the only country in the world to have abandoned space launch capability.
It was a joke (see icon) not a rant from an anonymous coward.
Do have a lovely day.
… if not to check for problems and test emergency routines?
Certainly Galilieo has had more than its fair share of problems, but it seems both a little early and churlish to be making fun of it at this stage. We've become more or less dependent on sat-nav, so having a service not beholden to the military of a single government would seem like a sine qua non, n'est ce pas?
Galileo is significantly more accuate and ambitious than GPS, so some of the stuff is being done for the first time.
Is this really a major failure? It's still in the test phase, in which case, while failures are not necessarily expected, it's as important to see how they're dealt with, as what actually went wrong. Is monitoring good enough? Are reaction times fast enough? Is theree sufficient redundancy and resiliency.
I prefer to wait for the full explanation before declaring SNAFU, which, of course, it must just be.
Well it is in the pilot phase, that's true - but it's been in that phase since December 2016! That's a long time ago (even if not in a galaxy far away)...
Obviously you'd expect a decent length of testing, but this does seem rather too long. Given that testing actually started earlier, when they were putting the first major lot of satellites into orbit. I imagine it also takes quite a while to commission them once they're on station - so that would lengthen the testing a lot, but the ground infrastructure has had a lot longer to test than some of the constellation - so this is a bit rubbish.
Also it's a whole nother level of cock-up - to be out for half a week! This system is supposed to be robust enough for military targetting purposes, as well as various other high accuracy saftety-critical applications.
You cant declare you have a fully operational system until you have the full constellation in space. And unsurprisingly, it takes quite a long time to build the satellites and launch them, which is why there is despite starting so long ago, only 22 working satellites out of the planned 30 (ok 2 are launched but still in testing before joining the network). The whole thing is due to turn on next year officially, so I think they're going pretty well.
TITSUP's happen, thats what testings for. And lets all be thankful, that the failure looks like coming from a ground segment. That's a hell of a lot easier to get a repair man to then orbit...
Its not been in testing that long - the constellation is not yet fully deployed. it has just reached critical minimum this year.
The FIRST satellites went up only 2 years after the proposal was funded. I think its pretty damn good going.
GPS can (and has been) selectively turned off at will by the military. This Gallelo system has a lot more functions and makes some others more financially achievable. GPS is in its 3rd or 4th generation, Gallelo does not use US tech in its assembly of course.
As to a whole level of cock up - no its not - GPS has been out for almost as long in the past- and parts are out often - or reolution goes down to 10s of kilometers. GPS has only got the minimum constellation up at the moment - if any go down now, its goiong to be inaccurate until replacement series 3's can be deployed. You can review GPS outages here:
https://navcen.uscg.gov/?Do=GPSReportStatus
Its not been in testing that long - the constellation is not yet fully deployed. it has just reached critical minimum this year.
It's not exactly been plain sailing to this point though. Given the clock problems (which may or may not have been sorted out), one wonders for how long the constellation will be fully operational.
The FIRST satellites went up only 2 years after the proposal was funded. I think its pretty damn good going.
I recall that they had to get something up there transmitting sharpish in order to keep the frequency allocations live. Once you've applied to the ITU for a license, the clock starts transmitting and they will cancel your allocation if you don't use it.
Gallelo does not use US tech in its assembly of course.
Perhaps that's showing up; why would European generation 1 necessarily be reliable?
TBH I think the people who have got this right are the Japanese. Their few satellites compliement GPS quite nicely, but the way they've avoided having to have finickety atomic clocks on board is genius. It makes the satellites cheaper and probably more reliable, without degrading performance. That's clearly the way to go, even if you do have to have a global array of ground stations. However, despite everything the sun still doesn't set on what's left of the British empire. If anyone can host such ground stations within its own territories with sufficient visibility to allow the QZSS style of timekeeping to work globally, Britain probably can, especially if countries like Canada, Japan and Australia want to join in too. A GPS compatible GNSS could probably be launched for surprisingly small amounts of money.
Quote
Also it's a whole nother level of cock-up - to be out for half a week! This system is supposed to be robust enough for military targetting purposes, as well as various other high accuracy saftety-critical applications.
Which leads on to...
Its nice to know taking out a small building in Italy will disable the Euro-GPS system...
As us mere mortals aren't bothered about relying on the generous US largese (beer owed), one could argue that the only reasons for Gallileo to exist at all is:
1) for French overseas millitary operations taking place without US service denials. Pity they put a critical component in Italy then (especially as Italy is reputed to be becoming in thrall to Chinese financial, and surely then politiical, influence).
2) so that European politicians can slap their space dicks on the Who's Big in Space table and show off. Currently looking a bit deflated there, chaps?
it's been in that phase since December 2016! That's a long time ago
Two and a half years isn't that long for something as huge and complex as a new satellite constellation plus ground stations doing extremely high precision stuff (in space and time.)
Compare with, say, HMS Queen Elizabeth - commissioned in 2017, not scheduled to be fully operational until 2020 at the earliest, with the first operational cruise pencilled in for 2021.
"Are reaction times fast enough? Is theree sufficient redundancy and resiliency."
Apparently not yet. There simply can't be a 100% shutdown in the production system when you consider what the planned uses are. Yes, the users can easily fall back to another, competing system, but the reality is the system must not just stop working, ever. It may run in a degraded state for some short length of time, but never actually stop.
I'm sure coincidences are coincidental, but it's interesting that Galileo went down a month after GPS glitched.
Would be nice to have something truly independent. Maybe that what old Jimmy Wales is saving up for. (Actually, that's a point, what happened to ElReg's anti-wiki posts? They were more frequent than BOFH posts at one point.)
There were (are?) long wave systems that provided a very different alternative but they suffer from much poor accuracy in comparison (direct consequence of limited bandwidth), generally were not designed to provide altitude, and consume a lot of power to run the numerous ground stations.
Probably a damn sight cheaper though than chucking £5bn at a Brexit alternative though...
Edited to add: Seems the UK decided to close its Loran facilities in 2015 (oh, bad timing!) and the US is considering resurrecting it at around $35M/year cost in 2007 but has also closed its facilities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loran-C#United_Kingdom_eLORAN_implementation
eLoran would be either an excellent alternative, or indeed a prime equivalent of a GNSS. The accuracy achieved was pretty good AFAIK (meters). Applying modern digital receiver technology to a very old-style signal was a good idea.
One really big advantage is that it's very difficult to jam over any appreciable area; you need large antennas to radiate power at those frequencies, not something the ordinary jamming enthusiast is going to fit to their car.... It'll also survive a decent solar storm, unlike a GNSS system.
One disadvantage is that it's essentially a regional system; it'd be tricky to provide a truly global system based on eLoran. So if one's motivation is partly adverturous overseas military operations, it's probably not the thing to go for.
LORAN sucked. Big time. While a few might hold fond memories, most former users don't miss it in the least.
Big wavelengths meant big antennas, poor resolution, and quirky propagation. Ground based stations multiplied the opportunities for reflected signals. Pretty much every use required the operator to have some understanding of propagation variations. Sometimes even a sophisticated education. Accuracy was poor, but repeatability was good. While the system could be used without maps, accurate use required charts with grid lines that corrected for the fixed component of errors.
As proof that the system wasn't especially loved, most government service cannot be killed. Especially ones where the users have major equipment investments. LORAN died with barely a complaint.
As I understand it, Britain was trying to convince others in the EU to continue with eLoran but the French ended the argument by bringing down their eLoran towers with explosives - Britain gave up on the argument and decommissioned their eLoran not long afterwards. The Americans are looking at resurrecting their eLoran system, maybe in response to the recent Russian jamming of GPS during a NATO exercise in Norway. The Russians have a couple of terrestrial alternatives to GNSS, so jamming GPS and Galileo would make sense for their military.
Probably a damn sight cheaper though than chucking £5bn at a Brexit alternative though...
Seriously, what the hell is the relevance of Brexit to this? Yes, there have been talks about brewing our own GPS-alike, but nothing else in this story has been about Brexit. It doesn't have to be brought in to every comments thread...
"It doesn't have to be brought in to every comments thread..."
Haven't you listened to / read / watched the news recently? It's like nothing else has happened in the last three years.
Seriously, Brexit is the answer to everything these days. It's why England won the cricket (according to the ugly tit that keeps spouting bollocks). I thought it was due to a technicality, but he's more important than me so... There you go. Brexit won cricket. Brexit broke the satellites. Brexit...
"Seriously, Brexit is the answer to everything these days."
Either that or climate change. I am even seeing people post about a 'climate emergency' in all seriousness! Maybe this is the first world problems thing pushed further. We are so comfortable with so little to fear that we start attributing fear to everything.
exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology...We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. -- Carl Sagan
No, that quote can't really be checked, it says 'sooner or later', so it can't only be checked after the collapse.
Like all good prophecies from omens throughout history it is intentionally vague, if 5000 years from now civilization insists on not collapsing, well, he said 'sooner or later' so it may just be going to happen.
Also, like all good prophecies, it makes the point of making the rubes, in this case educated rubes, on the receiving end feel superior so they will repeat it.
I fail to see how a society dependent on technology with relatively few people having technological expertise could work in the long term.
Well, that's they way we're heading. I agree, it won't work. Universities used to teach subjects like silicon chip design. Now they don't. There's really only a few people in the world who really know what they're doing in silicon engineering, and they're either from Taiwan, Japan or (less so these days) the USA, but increasingly from China.
How many people are taught C/C++ these days? Not many. So who's going to write the operating systems?
The scary thing is that nations like China believes in the value of proper engineering educations in all fields. Increasingly it'll be countries like that which will innovate, whilst the rest of the world stagnates.
It was always this way. At nearly every point in history, the vast majority of humans would not be able to sustain the loss of the technology they used. In the 1950s, only a small subset of people could get electricity running again if power plants stopped existing. They'd have to build generators, obtain fuel from somewhere, and find some method of cleaning up the power so their electrical devices would be able to run on it. Even as we move back in history and technology becomes simpler, this continues to be the case. Do you think a medieval farmer, though undoubtedly skilled in agriculture in a way we modern humans are not, could get a plow together at that point? Of course they could, if they already had the necessary technology. Could they if they first had to manufacture an axe to get the lumber and the metalworking tools the blacksmith had using only things found in the natural world? I wouldn't count on it.
Fewer people study silicon design, but that doesn't matter much. If we ended up in a disaster scenario, even if we had all the silicon designers available, we'd also have to have the people who build the machines that manufacture chips, and the people who power those machines, and the people who get the raw materials out of the ground, and the people who purify the materials after they got out of the ground, and the people who build the machines for that, and the people to ensure all the aforementioned people don't die due to starvation, disease, or environmental factors (temperature, something toxic, etc).
Similarly, I was taught C and C++. I consider myself somewhat skilled at writing in them. I've written things at the operating system level. I've been employed writing in those languages. Could I, alone, develop an OS? Not a chance. I'd need to read a lot about how the real OS developers have done things so I could copy their ideas. And could I do that if I had to start from scratch? Even less of a chance. I haven't written a C compiler, and I haven't ever really connected to one.
Most disasters don't destroy everything. Even if a small area was preserved while the rest of the world was obliterated, there would be technology from before the disaster in that area if there were humans there. They would have to rebuild a lot of stuff, but they would do it on the back of the tech that existed before. And there's a reason turns of phrase like "blasted back to the stone age" exist, because they'd have to reinvent several wheels. But this was always the case. There was never some miraculous time when the majority knew what they were doing technologically that we've thrown away.
Every now and then i wonder about the Carrington Event in 1859. I'm fairly certain if that happened today we would see the end of civilisation as we know it. What we need is a backup system something on the lines of RaspberryPis with mesh networking over shortwave and wifi , a solar panel, battery and a large disk with as much info on how to switch the world back on in it.
"The problem appears to be related to a facility on the ground that generates the time used by the satellites to provide position information. The satellites themselves have their own clocks, but there have a been a number of issues with some of those on orbit. Those should be synchronised with ground-based atomic clocks, and without that synchronisation any location data would be unreliable."
When you think about the fact atomic clocks in those sats are not precise enough for the service, because the position service relies on radio transmission timings, and you need to re-sync those sats clocks from the ground, and cope with the delays of course, which vary, depending on position of said sats, you realize operating such infra is a bloody challenge.
Kuddos to the US for having this running glitchless for so long !
PS: I know for a fact ESA had no idea how to operate this, back in 2013. Maybe now, they have. Or not.
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