Location information is an important piece of mobile contextual information as I discussed in my previous post. This information is being used in navigation, construction, logistics, location based services, asset protection and many other areas. When the accuracy degrades, the risk of errors in these areas increases. These errors could in some situations lead to catastrophic failures.

Most outdoor positioning technologies depend heavily on the American GPS (Global Positioning System). This dependency is continuously increasing with new areas of applications. These applications are also made for the current accuracy and might be unusable when accuracy degrades.

TidBITS now reports that GPS accuracy may degrade significanty when the US government does not take action to launch new GPS satellites.

An alternative could be the European satellite network Galileo, but that project also suffers from delays in satellite launches with currently only two test satellites in orbit. The third was planned to launch H2 2008, but now seems to be launched in Q1 2010. Galileo is planned to be operational in 2013, but I doubt it, looking at all the current and previous delays.