"Open" satellite signals not open
Wendy M. Grossman, Galileo satellite’s secure codes cracked, The Guardian, August 31, 2006. Excerpt:
One of the consequences of a national policy that taxpayers should have free access to the data their taxes pay for - as is the case in the US - is that if you tell American researchers something is free or open source, their expectations are raised.
So when a team of researchers led by Mark Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, discovered that the signals coming from a European test satellite that they thought to be accessible were instead protected by secret codes, they set about cracking them and succeeded. But their success, which allows them and others to test prototype receivers for Europe’s new global satellite navigation system, raises two questions: can the body in charge of it, the Galileo Joint Undertaking, succeed as a public-private partnership? And how open will its service be? …
Part of Galileo’s goal is to improve global accuracy and availability. To enable that, an EU-US agreement says Galileo will use the same set of radio frequencies as [the US-built] GPS and in return must offer an open service “without direct fees for end use”.
But having had to crack the test satellite’s codes, Psiaki asks whether Galileo intends to charge for the part of the service that’s supposed to be open? …
