An over-reliance on the ageing Global Positioning System has put critical infrastructure at serious potential risk of failure if the GPS network is ever disrupted, Canberra-based spatial expert Nunzio Gambale has warned.

“The dependency that we are building on this technology is actually now becoming a sovereignty issue,” Mr Gambale said. “We have no local control of GPS satellites and no viable back-up for them. This is a critical vulnerability, and a serious problem.”

If the GPS system fails – or is deliberately interrupted through an act of economic sabotage – critical infrastructure ranging from the telephone system to automated teller machines and other financial services, all the way through to the electricity grid, would be at risk of catastrophic failure.

Mr Gambale is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Locata Corporation, a developer of location systems that complement the GPS system urban environments. He will present a keynote address entitled ‘An Inconvenient Truth – GPS is a ticking time-bomb’ at the spatial@gov conference being held at the National Convention Centre from November 20-22.

Mr Gambale says although the GPS system is still considered “the Gold Standard” for positioning, the critical dependencies are now caused by myriad applications that were never envisaged when GPS was developed in the 1970’s.

“GPS at its core is not a system that is about finding nearby pizza restaurants. The amount of critical national infrastructure that now relies on GPS for its fundamental operation is staggering… and almost completely unknown to people outside the GPS industry,” he said. “The nation – and the world – has to have a system to back-up GPS – and the sooner the better”.