NextNav Showcases APNT Backup to GNSS at European Commission's Joint Research Centre’s Trial

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NextNav (Nasdaq: NN) today announced that it has recently participated in the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) alternative positioning, navigation, and timing (APNT) evaluation in Ispra, Italy. According to the JRC, the trial is analyzing the technologies “which could deliver positioning, and/or timing information, independently from GNSS, to be effective backup in the event of GNSS disruption, and if possible to be able to provide PNT in the environments where GNSS cannot be delivered.” The test furthers the European Union’s creation of a backup to the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as Galileo or GPS, and is intended to assess which technologies could strengthen and expand the European PNT capacity.

PNT services are critical for the global economy, with studies estimating a contribution to the European GDP of approximately 10%. Today, GNSS services are the backbone of PNT, with an increasing role in new services and technologies, including car-sharing, autonomous vehicles, ship and aircraft navigation, smart logistics, and precision agriculture. The timing capabilities of PNT are heavily utilized today by critical infrastructure, which are strategic from a commercial and societal perspective, including telecom, energy, finance, and transportation. Published studies estimated economic losses of around 1 billion EUR per day if GNSS is unavailable. NextNav’s JRC trial focused on measuring the precision of timing delivery across alternate timing sources to better understand performance in GNSS-free environments – including instances of outages, spoofing, and jamming. As a part of the trial, NextNav also demonstrated its capabilities in providing both indoor and outdoor “z-axis” vertical location.

“The trials conducted by ISPRA on behalf of the European Commission are part of the global trend to develop a resilience layer to space-based GPS/GNSS systems that is more secure and available,” said Ganesh Pattabiraman, CEO of NextNav. “We are redefining the capabilities of APNT technologies, and look forward to working with the European Commission on furthering these initiatives to build a GNSS-backup layer that can deliver highly-precise PNT across use-cases.”

The US and countries across Europe continue to invest in both understanding and taking steps towards creating a resilient PNT layer in each nation. The participation in the JRC trial builds upon the recent evaluation of APNT technologies in the United States, including a 2021 U.S. Department of Transportation report, where TerraPoiNT was found to be the best performing APNT solution across use-cases. Further, NextNav recently created an APNT testbed in the San Francisco Bay area that was developed as part of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security demonstration used to evaluate the precision and resilience of NextNav’s TerraPoiNT network. The JRC is expected to report results from the evaluation in spring 2022.

Source: NN-FIN

About NextNav
NextNav (Nasdaq: NN) is a leader in next generation GPS, enabling a whole new ecosystem of applications and services that rely upon vertical location and resilient geolocation technology. The company’s Pinnacle network delivers highly accurate vertical positioning to transform location services, reflect the 3D world around us, and support innovative, new capabilities. NextNav’s TerraPoiNT network delivers accurate, reliable, and resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services to support critical infrastructure and other GPS-reliant systems in the absence or failure of GPS.

NextNav Media Contact
Mahmood Abu-Rubieh
LaunchSquad for NextNav
NextNav@launchsquad.com