Spirent Communications, a Keysight Technologies KEYS -4.28%↓ company, has announced a partnership with the European Space Agency to enhance positioning, navigation and timing resilience for the UK’s critical national infrastructure. Under ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Program, Spirent will lead a three-year project to develop standards for quantifying and improving PNT performance against threats like jamming and spoofing.
A 2023 UK government report warns that a seven-day GNSS outage could cost £7.6 billion, hitting finance, energy and telecom sectors hard. Spirent’s expertise in emulating PNT disruptions — from 5G and AI networks to autonomous vehicles — equips it to deliver benchmarks for validating equipment, identifying vulnerabilities and promoting best practices amid cyber and geopolitical risks.
The Spirent PNT Alliance will convene industry, academia and groups like the Royal Institute of Navigation to commercialize tools and build a UK ecosystem. The PNT Shopfront will highlight compliant solutions for regulations, while the PNT Resiliency Health Check provides audits scoring GNSS devices on performance, security and endurance using Spirent’s interference-replicating simulators.
“This initiative quantifies PNT resilience, arming infrastructure with tools to counter threats,” said Mark Holbrow, Spirent’s vice president of engineering and product development for positioning.
