Increasing incidents of interference with aviation, maritime and other satellite telecommunications services mean states must urgently enhance the protection of a critical radio-frequency band, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and International Maritime Organization (IMO) have said with “grave concern” in a joint statement.
These cases of harmful interference are in the form of jamming and spoofing that disrupt Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) operating in the frequency bands allocated to the Radio Navigation Satellite Service (RNSS).
In the statement, it was revealed that global navigation satellite systems are constellations of Earth-orbiting satellites that provide positioning, navigation and timing services worldwide that are critical for the safety and efficiency of civilian aircraft, maritime vessels, and humanitarian assistance vehicles, as well as for time synchronisation of telecommunications networks.
ITU Secretary-General, Doreen Bogdan-Martin said: “Global Navigation Satellite Systems are critical to our safety on land, at sea and in the air.
“Member states should ensure the uninterrupted operation of these systems for everyone’s safety and the resilience of essential services that our lives depend on.”
The joint statement, co-signed by the three UN agencies, requests member states to, among others, protect the RNSS from transmissions that can adversely cause harmful interference degrading, interrupting or misleading signals used for civilian and humanitarian purposes, reinforce resilience of the systems which rely on RNSS for navigation, positioning and timing in relation to this type of interference, retain sufficient conventional navigation infrastructure for contingency support in case of RNSS outages and misleading signals, and develop mitigation techniques for loss of services, increase collaboration between radio regulatory, civil aviation, maritime, defence and enforcement authorities, as well as and report cases of harmful interference affecting RNSS to the appropriate telecommunication, aeronautical and maritime authorities, and to the ITU Radiocommunications Bureau to enable the monitoring of the situation.
Protecting radiocommunications systems from harmful interference is at the core of ITU’s mandate, according to the Director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, Mario Maniewicz, who added: “We call on our members to make responsible use of the radiofrequency spectrum, which is a precious, natural and shared resource we rely on for communicating, travelling and working in our daily lives.”
According to the agencies, jamming is an unnecessary transmission, the transmission of superfluous signals, or the transmission of signals without identification.
Spoofing is the broadcast of GNSS-like signals that can cause a GNSS receiver in a vessel or aircraft to calculate erroneous positions and provide false guidance.
