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Writer's pictureDavid Mitlyng

Weekly Takeaways-October 4, 2024

Timing is Everything (Pun Intended)The alarming rise in GPS spoofing is raising a much bigger concern than commercial flights.When we think of GPS, we think of position - it's in the P in GPS, after all. But the real value is as a clock for the world. It is the ticking heartbeat for networks, financial transactions, data centers, and power grids, that, if stopped, credit cards and ATMS would go offline, communications would degrade and fail, and, eventually, the world would go dark.Not surprisingly, efforts are underway to address this single point of failure. But adding resilience is only one half of the equation; there are benefits to building something better.Currently, GPS is limited to an accuracy of tens of nanoseconds - nearly a millionth of a second.That may seem absurdly short, but it is simply forever for modern networks and electronics. Better accuracy is needed to enable new capabilities, including:

  • Coordinated signal processing: combining signals from different sources requires that they are in "phase." While timing from GPS is good enough for 4G LTE, it is barely good enough for 5G and not nearly accurate enough for 6G.

  • Time-stamping of digital events: when events occur nearly simultaneously in separate locations, accurate synchronization is necessary to understand the correct order of events. This is becoming even more critical with high-frequency trading, blockchain, and new regulations "to increase transparency."

  • Buffer read/write: time-stamping is also used within distributed databases that need accurate timing to efficiently send and receive data to offset power-hungry AI, with a study showing that a synchronization improvement of 80x made a distributed database run 3x faster.

  • Geolocation: space and time are linked by the speed of light (light travels a meter in a few nanoseconds), so better position knowledge requires better timing.

  • Time-of-flight: accurate synchronization leads to=> accurate time-of-flight measurements that leads to => accurate gravity gradient measurements, gravity waves detection, weather forecastingfiber cable breaks or intrusions, homing in on reference (or rogue) signals, lightning strikes, or gunshots, and even detecting and locating people behind walls using wi-fi routers.

Last Week's Theme: Nightmare at 32,000 Feet

 

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The More You Know...

Timing is Everything (No Pun Intended)In Greek mythology, Kairos, the youngest son of Zeus, was the personification of opportune time - as well as our company namesake.Unlike Chronos, who is depicted as an old man "personifying the destructive and stifling aspects of time," Kairos is depicted as a young man, always running, with a long lock of hair hanging down from his forehead since "opportunity could only be grasped as he approached."GPS is the definition of Kairos, an accidental solution that emerged exactly when the world needed timing for early digital communication networks. While it now touches every part of our modern technology-driven world, for two decades we have known that something better is needed.So why hasn't something better emerged? Because Kairos requires new enabling technology and capabilities that weren't ready - until recently:

Timing is everything.

 

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