BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

Posted by sksxihve 4/13/2025

BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of(www.jeffgeerling.com)

430 points | 174 commentspage 3

publicola1990 4/13/2025|

While this is is interesting, the "nobody's heard of" phrase is rather condescending and such phrases leave a bad taste in the mind.

jen729w 4/13/2025||

Hmm it's just a turn of phrase. I would bet you $100 that no more than 0.001% of the population have heard of BPS. I hadn't. That's functionally "nobody".

jandrese 4/13/2025|||

The title is still clickbait given the reason nobody has heard of it is that it barely exists and is not useful yet.

Also, it smelled a bit like wishful thinking to assume the high precision clock would not be driven by GPS on real world deployments. I know some cell towers synchronize via PTP, but a great many others use GPS as their time source.

geerlingguy 4/13/2025||

For anyone who deploys GPS-based timing systems at scale, having more sources of precise time is a huge boon. (Some companies pay many millions for dark fiber just to have a redundant time source).

Holdover can only help so much, if there's a persistent jamming effort, it can wreak havoc on many time-critical systems.

bmacho 4/13/2025|||

It's worse in every way than just omitting it. 'BPS is a GPS alternative' is better as a title, on HN at least

Calwestjobs 4/13/2025|||

yes saying jeff geerling is the nobody who never heard of that thing is offensive to me. XD

p_ing 4/13/2025||

It's a curiosity gap headline; it's a lazy form of headline that insults the intelligence of the audience. It also extends into clickbait.

Poor form. Do better.

ConteMascetti71 4/13/2025||

Could be cheated with a retartd line?

Iwan-Zotow 4/13/2025||

GLONASS? Baidu?

toomuchtodo 4/13/2025|

Controlled by other nation states.

LeoPanthera 4/13/2025||

Galileo. Controlled by the EU, and therefore a better choice than GPS, since the United States is no longer trustworthy.

petesergeant 4/13/2025|||

It's a little unclear to me from reading the Wikipedia page; is it fully functional today, and worldwide? It'd be cool if my phone showed me which systems it was using at any time, but I have chosen The One True Apple Way so I don't think that'll come any time soon

Flatterer3544 4/13/2025|||

Yes it has full world coverage, see the esa navipedia for more info.

No idea how it is in the US, but in EU you can't really easily choose, it will by default use GPS+Galileo combined for better accuracy.

I guess you can through developer settings on android though.

Tawy74 4/13/2025|||

If you're on Android there's an app, GPS Test that shows you a chart with all the signals it's picking up with different symbols for each system and a filter too. My phone is currently picking up 5 GPS, 4 GLONASS, 8 Galileo, and even 3 Beidou sat signals (I'm in Western Europe).

Also you should be able to look up your phone specifications to see what GNSS services it's capable of using on GSMArena

Edit:oh I missed that you're on Apple so that app is useless for you. Still might be of some use to others though.

Tabular-Iceberg 4/13/2025|||

Honestly how trustworthy was the US before? Are we supposed to be completely fine with PRISM and XKeyscore now?

Calwestjobs 4/13/2025||

well i do not share your "enthusiasm" do not forget those systems used twitter,google,amazon,microsoft infrastructure, so those private companies build it first...

throw84848484 4/13/2025|

This system should be shutdown. What if enemies use it to guide their rockets?

Calwestjobs 4/13/2025|

your phone ai can recognize dogs in your photos, and militaries have all kinds of aerial survey, satellit photos of your house, so do they really need to use external radio signals, or is it enough for them to use fully internal system with just cameras and khadas mind 2 ?