GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
In: Technology
The time stamp from each GPS satellite is also used heavily by the banking system worldwide.
”Putting a little clock in the credit-card machines wouldn’t work, because over time, even the most precise clocks start to differ from one another. That doesn’t matter when you’re meeting me for lunch at noon, but if you’re timing transactions down to the microsecond standard now used in many electronic networks, tiny differences can screw up your whole operation.
What makes the Global Positioning System so crucial, then, isn’t in fact the “positioning” part; it’s the ability to make machines all over the planet agree on exactly what time it is.
Developed and launched by the US military in the 1980s, GPS became fully operational in 1993. Today it consists of 31 satellites. Each satellite contains an atomic clock, which is synced regularly with high-precision timing devices at the US Naval Observatory. Phones, ATMs and other devices can pick up the timing signals from three or four satellites, and use the knowledge of exactly when each signal was sent to triangulate their position on earth.
Besides providing the military with better way-finding, the ubiquitous timing signal became a public good used by numerous private industries.”
Further, mobile phone networks rely on GPS to super accurately time the parcels of data for each conversation. There’s a good read here…
https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-depends-on-gps-and-its-shockingly-vulnerable-to-attack
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