Finland to deploy Galileo following allegations of Russian GPS jamming
Finland will deploy the European Union Galileo satellite positioning system in the beging of 2020. One of the key features of the new is better protection against signal jamming. This was recently brought up after wide scale GPS jamming operations in northern Finland during the NATO war games.
Russia was suspected of being behind the jamming of positioning signals of the US developed GPS system. The country was quick to deny it was behind the operation. Galileo is a positioning system developed by the EU, and is already used by the authorities to improve location services.
GPS (Global Positioning System) is the most common positioning system in use in Finland. The technology, developed in the United States in the 1970, gained mass adoption after it's resolution was enhanced in the early 2000's. Nowadays states have developed and deployedalternatives like Russia's Glonas and China's BeiDou.
Unlike GPS, the Galileo system can be configured to encrypt communications, which makes it harder to counterfit critical signals. Each European Union country is free to use whatever features of the system, and it is open to commercial operators such as banks.
While it will still be possible to interfere with the signals with powerful transmitters, counterfitting data will be near-impossible with encryption. The system is already widely deployed, as many consumer devices such as smartphones already use it. The total number of Galileo satellites is currently 17, but should reach 24 in the near future.