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Formerly | Commlabs [1] |
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Company type | Public |
Nasdaq: NN | |
Industry | Location technology, Wireless |
Founded | 2007 |
Headquarters | Reston, Virginia, U.S. |
Number of employees | 61 (2021) [2] |
Website | nextnav |
NextNav, Inc. is the developer of a 3D geolocation service known as Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS), a wide-area location and timing technology designed to provide services in areas where GPS or other satellite location signals cannot be reliably received. MBS consumes significantly less power than GPS and includes high-precision altitude. In the United States, NextNav operates its MBS network over its spectrum licenses in the 920-928 MHz band. [3] [4] [5] [6] The company went public on Nasdaq in October 2021 with a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Spartacus Acquisition Corporation. [7]
NextNav distributed its Pinnacle vertical location service in January 2021, which provides floor-level vertical location using barometric sensors from cell phones and other devices. Their Pinnacle network was distributed in partnership with AT&T and is in more than 4,400 cities across the United States. The larger NextNav network uses Metropolitan Beacon System technology to deliver high-precision three-dimensional indoor location capabilities across a market area. MBS is built on principles similar to GPS transmitting precisely timed signals from a network of wide-area beacons enabling receivers to use trilateration techniques to determine their precise locations. This differs significantly from other approaches to indoor and urban location, which rely on short-range, local-area transmitters.
Due to the terrestrial placement of the transmitters and the sub-GHz nature of the signal, MBS signals can travel several kilometers and—because the network is specifically designed, deployed, and managed for indoor positioning—can be reliably received in deep indoor conditions that block satellite signals (e.g., GPS, GLONASS). MBS signals also enable location to be computed with far lower power drain than GPS. In addition, the system incorporates barometric pressure compensation technology that allows receivers equipped with pressure sensors to compute their altitude very precisely, typically within a floor.
A byproduct of the GPS-like operating principles of NextNav's MBS network is the ability to deliver high-precision (Stratum-1-level) timing to indoor locations or in the event of GPS outages.
MBS receivers are being commercialized as an additional constellation added to multi-constellation GNSS processors. Today's GPS processors typically process additional satellite constellations, and the MBS processing capability constitutes primarily firmware additions.
The performance of the technology under emergency dialing conditions was originally demonstrated in the CSRIC III test bed in San Francisco in 2012, with performance enhancements added on an ongoing basis. More recently the technology was enabled in the primary global telecommunication standards bodies, 3GPP (Release 13) [8] and OMA (SUPL 2.0.3). [9] MBS signal technology is available under FRAND terms.
The technology can be scaled for any location application, including services to mobile phones, the Internet of Things, and enterprise and public safety applications.
On March 11, 2024, NextNav announced it signed an agreement to acquire spectrum licenses covering an additional 4 MHz in the lower 900 MHz band (902-928) from Telesaurus Holdings GB LLC, and Skybridge Spectrum Foundation. NextNav acquired the additional spectrum licenses for a total purchase price of up to $50 million, paid for through a combination of cash and NextNav common stock. The acquired licenses are in the same lower 900 MHz band as NextNav's current licensed spectrum. On April 16, 2024, NextNav filed a rulemaking petition with the Federal Communications Commission to deliver a spectrum solution in the Lower 900 MHz band to facilitate a terrestrial positioning, navigation, and timing network (as a complement and backup to GPS) and broadband.
NextNav's Urban and Indoor Positioning service TerraPoiNT is available in San Francisco Bay Area, McLean, VA and other select markets. Its Pinnacle vertical location service is available in more than 4,400 cities nationwide and has partnered with AT&T FirstNet to provide vertical location service for First Responders.
In November 2022, NextNav has recently completed the acquisition of a geolocation system provider based in France, specializing in low-power technologies, Nestwave. [10]
The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radio navigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provide geolocation and time information to a GPS receiver anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. It does not require the user to transmit any data, and operates independently of any telephone or Internet reception, though these technologies can enhance the usefulness of the GPS positioning information. It provides critical positioning capabilities to military, civil, and commercial users around the world. Although the United States government created, controls and maintains the GPS system, it is freely accessible to anyone with a GPS receiver.
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GLONASS is a Russian satellite navigation system operating as part of a radionavigation-satellite service. It provides an alternative to Global Positioning System (GPS) and is the second navigational system in operation with global coverage and of comparable precision.
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In the context of information security, and especially network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which a person or program successfully identifies as another by falsifying data, to gain an illegitimate advantage.
OMA SpecWorks, previously the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), is a standards organization which develops open, international technical standards for the mobile phone industry. It is a nonprofit Non-governmental organization (NGO), not a formal government-sponsored standards organization as is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services.
Assisted GNSS (A-GNSS) is a GNSS augmentation system that often significantly improves the startup performance—i.e., time-to-first-fix (TTFF)—of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). A-GNSS works by providing the necessary data to the device via a radio network instead of the slow satellite link, essentially "warming up" the receiver for a fix. When applied to GPS, it is known as assisted GPS or augmented GPS. Other local names include A-GANSS for Galileo and A-Beidou for BeiDou.
A satellite navigation or satnav system is a system that uses satellites to provide autonomous geopositioning. A satellite navigation system with global coverage is termed global navigation satellite system (GNSS). As of 2024, four global systems are operational: the United States's Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), and the European Union's Galileo.
Real-time kinematic positioning (RTK) is the application of surveying to correct for common errors in current satellite navigation (GNSS) systems. It uses measurements of the phase of the signal's carrier wave in addition to the information content of the signal and relies on a single reference station or interpolated virtual station to provide real-time corrections, providing up to centimetre-level accuracy. With reference to GPS in particular, the system is commonly referred to as carrier-phase enhancement, or CPGPS. It has applications in land surveying, hydrographic surveying, and in unmanned aerial vehicle navigation.
The International Cospas-Sarsat Programme is a satellite-aided search and rescue (SAR) initiative. It is organized as a treaty-based, nonprofit, intergovernmental, humanitarian cooperative of 45 nations and agencies. It is dedicated to detecting and locating emergency locator radio beacons activated by persons, aircraft or vessels in distress, and forwarding this alert information to authorities that can take action for rescue. Member countries support the distribution of distress alerts using a constellation of around 65 satellites orbiting the Earth which carry transponders and signal processors capable of locating an emergency beacon anywhere on Earth transmitting on the Cospas-Sarsat frequency of 406 MHz.
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A positioning system is a system for determining the position of an object in space. One of the most well-known and commonly used positioning systems is the Global Positioning System (GPS).
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GPS Block IIIF, or GPS III Follow On (GPS IIIF), is the second set of GPS Block III satellites, consisting of up to 22 space vehicles. The United States Air Force began the GPS Block IIIF acquisition effort in 2016. On 14 September 2018, a manufacturing contract with options worth up to $7.2 billion was awarded to Lockheed Martin. The 22 satellites in Block IIIF are projected to start launching at the end of 2026, with launches estimated to last through at least 2034.