The global GPS wars and Africa’s search for a seat at the table

Today, most of us take our location services on phone for granted. Whether navigating in an Uber or ordering food at home, GPS is the key that has unlocked many of the conveniences of modern life.

Many of us know that GPS started life as a military satellite system in 1978 to help kill people with accuracy.

But fewer know that its use was expanded to civilians because a passenger flight was shot down by the Soviets. Death unsettled the killing machine.

To pacify some paranoid generals, positional errors were deliberately embedded in GPS so that it couldn’t be exploited by rogues to kill with precision. This early version of GPS was about 100 meters off.

Then in 2000, the decision was made that the benefits of accuracy outweighed potential misuse so the errors were removed. At any rate, by this time, smart technologists had already found a workaround called DGPS.

In 2018, a new unencrypted signal on the GPS radio band called L5, initially announced by Al Gore in 1998, became widely available on GPS allowing your Papaye fried rice motor courier to arrive within a few centimetres of your doorstep.

Of course, something like this will have competitors. All the usual geopolitical powers have their own version. In 2019, it was estimated that China’s BeiDou had overtaken GPS as the dominant navigation system in 30 countries. Panic set in at the US Pentagon since BeiDou was designed so that the satellite can also log the user’s tracks. 5 years on, GPS still maintains its dominance, especially in Internet applications, but its “market share” is down to ~60%.

Then in March 2024, Russia demoed its GPS mass-jammer. Whole swaths of Eastern Europe experienced intermittent GPS downtime. The reason, as you might guess, is that a lot of drones involved in killing in the Ukraine theatre use GPS. In May, the situation got so serious that some Finnish airports had to suspend flights.

Israel has also mastered mass GPS jamming and workarounds because of its issues with Iran.

But what soldiers can do, hustlers can too. Nowadays, GPS jam-tech is being used by hustlers in multiple contexts, from trying to fool speed cameras in New York to gaming the London stock market electronic time stamps to make a quick quid. The hustle is the hustle.

Various tech companies have launched what they claim are antidotes to such mass-jamming. Canada’s NovAtel, for instance, has a whole line of anti-jamming products.

Okay, I heard you, “what about Africa”. (You probably noticed from the attached GPS jamming map that Africa is “blank”).

Well, there is a group in South Africa looking for $150m to develop a more focused system for the continent called ASAS (China’s BeiDou cost over $10bn, mind you, but Russia may have build theirs with $4bn). They haven’t found the money. The AU has endorsed an African version of a concept called, SBAS, that’s like a GPS overlay. So far there has been a pilot of the idea involving two African airlines. The business case has yet to convince any African moneybags to chip in, though.

Some analysts have been asking: given that between 2018 and 2024, African governments budgeted $3.1 billion for their space projects, would a combined effort, akin to the EU’s Galileo, not have delivered more bang for buck?

Whether the “bang” is from a drone strike or cutlery doing justice to ceramic as food ordered online is being enjoyed?