America's $1.4 Trillion Clock Has No Backup

Shortly after midnight on September 25, GPS went down over Los Angeles.

Two United Airlines jets and an Alaska Airlines 737 reported widespread jamming that knocked out their satellite navigation.

Fortunately, the planes were fine.

Pilots have backup instruments and a controller on the radio to talk them through everything.

But, disconcertingly, no one knows what caused the outage and the rest of the economy isn’t so well supported.

Every Phone Call, Trade, and Power Line Runs on GPS Time

GPS is, at its heart, a clock in the sky.

Each satellite carries atomic clocks and broadcasts the exact time. Your receiver works out where you are from how long those signals take to arrive.

Over the past 30 years, almost everything else in the economy has quietly plugged into that clock.

Cell towers use GPS time to hand your call from one tower to the next.

Power companies use it to keep the grid synchronized and pinpoint faults.

Banks and exchanges use it to time-stamp trades down to the microsecond.

Data centers use it to keep thousands of servers working in lockstep.

All told, GPS underpins an estimated $1.4 trillion in U.S. economic activity, according to research firm RTI International.

And very little of it can tell when the clock is wrong.

So sensitivity and disruptions are not only a serious issue, but a serious vulnerability and a national security concern.

On January 26, 2016, the Air Force retired an old GPS satellite.

During the process, a bad software upload caused 15 other satellites to broadcast the wrong time.

The error was 13 microseconds. That’s 13 millionths of a second.

It was enough to cause trouble for about two days, according to timing firm Chronos Technology. BBC digital radio receivers across the U.K. went haywire. One broadcaster logged nearly 2,500 alarms from its timing equipment.

That was an accident. A tiny one, fixed within hours.

A deliberate attack would be another matter.

A study sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that a GPS outage would cost the U.S. economy about $1 billion a day.

After 30 days, wireless networks could be running at anywhere from 0%–60% of normal.

So what’s the backup plan?

There isn’t one.

Congress Has Been Warned for a Decade

On June 4, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held yet another hearing on the problem.

“We rely on GPS every single day, from navigation to national defense, but lack a backup system in case of failure,” said subcommittee chair Richard Hudson.

“Our adversaries are constantly looking for ways to jam and undermine America’s GPS system,” added full committee chair Brett Guthrie.

Testimony at the same hearing revealed that eight of the 32 satellites in the GPS constellation are running on single-string redundancy. One more failure and they’re done.

Meanwhile, Russia routinely jams GPS across Eastern Europe. Iran scrambled the navigation of more than 1,100 ships in the Persian Gulf when the war began in February.

And now a jammer has reached over the second-largest city in America.

The fix is simple to describe.

Every critical network needs its own clock on the ground, one precise enough that it never has to check the sky.

A Clock Built From a Single Atom

Most backup clocks today run on microwaves. They’re good, but they drift. Within hours of losing GPS, they start to slip out of sync.

An optical atomic clock ticks at the frequency of an individual atom, and that frequency never changes.

Until recently, optical clocks were room-sized lab instruments.

Now one small company has squeezed one into a box that fits in a server rack.

In February, it ran its optical clock on a live 22-kilometer fiber link between data centers in Chicago and Hammond, Indiana.

The clock held synchronization down to the picosecond, a trillionth of a second, and outperformed GPS-derived time on the timescales modern networks care about most.

GPS works in nanoseconds. This clock works in units a thousand times finer.

In April, the company teamed up with French aerospace giant Safran to sell the clock packaged with Safran’s timing gear to telecom carriers, power utilities, financial markets, data centers, and the military.

That same clock has already been tested aboard a Royal Navy uncrewed submarine.

And the company pairs it with quantum motion sensors and a quantum gravity sensor it’s building for NASA, giving it the full navigation stack for a battlefield with no GPS at all.

Washington Wants a Piece

This company has been doing work for DARPA for more than a decade.

It holds more than 230 patents, issued and pending.

Second-quarter revenue jumped 157% from a year ago, and management raised its full-year outlook to about $45 million.

It has more than half a billion dollars in cash and securities.

And in May, the Commerce Department signed a letter of intent to invest up to $100 million in the company in exchange for an equity stake.

Yet most investors have never heard of it, because it only started trading publicly this year.

I call its technology the Quantum Compass.

And every network in America that runs on GPS time is a potential customer.

I’ve laid out everything in my new report, “The Quantum Compass: Ground Zero for the Next Market Frenzy.”

You can get the full details here.