Is the Euro sat nav losing its way?

 

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Posted on 17 Dec 2007 at 07:55

Galileo was hailed as the superior rival to the US's ubiquitous Global Positioning System (GPS); a bold example of Europe flexing its technological muscle and eradicating our dependence on the Americans for critical navigation and tracking applications.

Yet the fledgling service remains perilously at sea - years behind schedule, floundering in financial crisis and with serious doubts over its technical competence. And according to a recent report from the House of Commons Transport Committee, the whole project is an expensive white elephant that should be destroyed immediately.

The EU originally intended industry to shoulder some of Galileo's R&D costs, but when no-one put up the money, the politicians decided taxpayers would foot the bill. The European Parliament recently granted extra funding for Galileo - with the cost of developing and running the system for 20 years expected to top 14 billion euros.

The escalating costs have prompted British MPs to call for a halt in the programme and await further cost-benefit analysis. "What taxpayers in the UK and other European countries really need is better railways and roads, not giant signature projects in the sky, providing services that we already have from GPS," argues the Transport Committee's chair, Gwyneth Dunwoody.

"The system may be obsolete even before it is operational... the best cost-benefit solution at this stage might be to scrap the programme entirely."

Nevertheless, with Juniper research claiming the Western European satnav market will be worth a staggering 8.3 billion euros by 2012 there is scope for clawing back investment. "Even according to the scathing parliamentary report, the UK has so far contributed only £96.7 million, but generated £147 million in contracts for UK companies," says Juniper researcher, Bruce Gibson.

Sat nav profits

The question is who will really profit? Sat nav device makers are the obvious beneficiaries, even if they are not rushing in with endorsements that might prompt Europe to send them the bill. Garmin says it is "actively monitoring" the development of Galileo, but would not say how much research budget was allocated to the project. It also claims there are technical hurdles to overcome, as "although GPS works on the same frequency as Galileo, they are still different technologies and anything that used both signals would need an additional receiver," according to Jessica Myers, communications manager for Garmin. The launch date slipping from 2008 to 2013 won't have helped to motivate the manufacturers, either.

But to judge what value really lies in Galileo, one needs to remember that it was set up to offer an alternative to GPS, a rival that would be more precise and give consumers and local entrepreneurs an opt-out from technology controlled by a foreign sovereign state.

"If the GPS signal went down, financial institution would go with it because they rely on the precise timing offered by the system's atomic clocks to exactly control money transfers," argues Adam Tucker of the Hertfordshire Business Incubation Centre. "GPS is good, but do we want to put our eggs in one basket controlled by the US military? No; although they are friends we are too reliant on their system."

The key difference between the systems is that GPS was built for military purposes, while Galileo was designed as a civil project with service level agreements, making it better suited to critical projects such as monitoring the ill or elderly and tracking. "If you track back to a military insurgence you see a glitch in the GPS service," claims Tucker. "It does happen so you can't rely on it for services where continuity is critical." The danger is underlined by communications watchdog Ofcom setting up an alert service for upcoming outages of the GPS network for military testing.