Weekly Takeaways-February 22, 2022

Theme of the Week

Time is Money Despite its name, timing from GPS represents the majority of its $1.4T in economic benefit. It has been estimated that a sustained GPS outage would knock out banking, communications and power, impact 13 of the 16 critical infrastructure, and cost the US economy $1B per day. Even beyond that, better timing provides direct benefits for:

• Data centers that want to improve efficiency to reduce power consumption

• Telcos that want to increase bandwidth and users

• Financial networks that want to reduce latency for high-frequency trading

• Exchanges that require verifiable timestamps to eliminate fraud

• Future 6G networks and the Quantum Internet that need sub-nanosecond timing

But timing from GPS has stagnated and will not improve. Something better is needed. Last Week's Theme: Ditch the Dial-Up

Industry News

• SpaceX lost 38 satellites due to an increase in atmospheric density caused by a solar storm. There is further concern that geomagnetic storms will destroy more satellites as solar activity has increased lately with more giant flares expected.

• Some good articles explaining quantum entanglement and quantum encryption.

• The University of Colorado has expanded the CUbit Quantum Initiative to build “Colorado’s prominence in quantum information science and technology.”

• Space is getting crowded. SpaceX is launching 30,000 satellites, E-Space recently announced plans to launch 100,000 satellites, and even the EU is planning their own constellation (with a "secure quantum communication infrastructure"). So various agencies and private companies are working on debris removal strategies, and the US and China are even cooperating to avoid space collisions.

The More You Know...

With Russia’s recent activities in the Ukraine there is speculation that they will rely on LORAN for navigation instead of GPS or their own GLONASS, a terrestrial navigation system dating back to World War II. Even though it is a relic compared to these space-based systems, it has been “maintained to protect their homeland with navigation and timing services when signals from space are not available.” Especially since Russia has shown how easy it is to jam and spoof GPS.