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, according to Canberra-based spatial expert Nunzio Gambale.

“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 at the CeBIT Global Conferences spatial@gov® conference titled ‘An Inconvenient Truth – GPS is a ticking time-bomb’.

View exclusive speaker interview with Nunzio Gambale.

Don’t miss out on the Global Positioning session on Wednesday 21 November

For more information, visit http://www.cebit.com.au/spatial.

Nunzio Gambale, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Locata Corporation