Spirent Partners with ESA on PNT resilience for CNI

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The initiative will see Spirent and partners deliver a comprehensive test framework designed to drive measurable resilience in PNT systems for users, operators and providers of CNI in the United Kingdom.

The new initiative, supported by Element 2 of ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP), is designed to raise awareness and improve resilient PNT test and assessment by providing a pathway to assess, validate and rate PNT equipment and services used in critical national infrastructure. With the 2023 UK Government report The Economic Impact on the UK of a Disruption to GNSS estimating a seven day GNSS outage could cost the UK economy £7.6 billion, the importance of the new initiative is clear, with CNI heavily dependent on satellite-based PNT systems and data. 

"The increasing reliance on PNT underpins operations that people and businesses rely on every day,” said Mark Holbrow, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at Spirent Positioning. “But for years, organisations have been wrestling with a fundamental challenge: they know PNT resilience matters but they do not have a clear way to measure it or benchmark their progress. This new initiative changes that by building the tools and frameworks that let critical national infrastructure operators quantify resilience, track it and improve it over time and we’re proud that ESA has entrusted Spirent to lead this exciting three-year project.”

The new initiative will support the UK Government’s Resilient PNT Strategy by enabling access to rigorous, quantitative test evidence and operational insights that help evaluate and validate PNT systems across essential sectors. It will comprise three core components: 

• Spirent PNT Alliance – bringing together companies, academic research partners, and PNT professional and government bodies to identify, develop and cater resilience services for CNI. 
• PNT Shopfront – showcasing solutions that aid the adoption of resilient PNT and help to assure regulatory compliance for critical PNT dependencies.
• PNT Resiliency Health Check – to enable independent appraisal of GNSS equipment capability against general performance, resilience and security criteria. 

The Spirent PNT Alliance will include the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) and other strategic partners to complement their activities and help build a resilient PNT ecosystem in the UK by commercialising best practices and connecting CNI operators with new technologies and test approaches. The annual PNT Health Check assessments will help organisations understand their dependencies, identify vulnerabilities and track improvements over time, with a technical framework that scores resilience against standard benchmarks to create a pathway toward industry-wide test methodologies.

“Intentional and malicious disruptions to GNSS are now a daily occurrence, and are pervasive in the aviation and maritime sector,” said Director of the Royal Institute of Navigation, Dr Ramsey Faragher. “The Royal Institute of Navigation is focused on raising awareness to these issues and in promoting the needs for improved resilience against such disruptions, especially within Critical National Infrastructure. Our Best Practice Guidelines emphasise the criticality of thorough testing in order to verify resilience and to help protect against both existing and future attack vectors. The UK is well placed to take a lead in this area and well placed to inspire other nations to follow suit. We are really pleased to see initiatives like these from our corporate partners and we look forward to supporting them.”

CNI operators in the UK finance, energy and telecommunications sectors are increasingly recognising vulnerability to GNSS jamming and spoofing and will benefit from the development of the new framework, while the project also has strong export potential, positioning the UK as a leader in PNT resilience testing services.