A National Positioning Infrastructure for Australia

Peter Woodgate | April 13, 2010

Many people reading this from outside the industry may ask at this point, what is a national positioning infrastructure?

 

What I’m referring to is Australia building the capacity for mobile, hand-held devices to locate one another extremely accurately – within a few centimeters – confidently, reliably and anywhere in Australia in a standard format which anybody can access. In much the same way that Telstra’s copper wire originally acted as the national infrastructure for our telephone system, a national positioning infrastructure would facilitate spatial data communications.

 

It would mean an investment in ground based infrastructure which would be properly networked, properly managed and properly regulated. This would be a big improvement from the incomplete and ad hoc system that we’ve got at the moment; which is a fragmented, state based, partially privatised, approach with huge gaps in it and low reliability over large areas.

 

Valuable research has already been conducted in to the cost/benefit analysis of undertaking this project.

 

Australia could build a national positing infrastructure from around 300 million dollars of investment, and we could achieve it quickly, building it over maybe 3 years, and requiring somewhere between 30-50 million dollars a year to run it. Economic modeling by Allen Consulting (2008) tells us that in three industries alone (agriculture, construction and mining) this infrastructure would add approximately 32 billion dollars of value to the Australian economy over the next 20 years. There’s also potential that income from licensing fees could help recoup some of the initial costs. 

 

So it would put Australia in an unprecedented competitive position in those three industries of mining, agriculture and construction alone, and we haven’t even modeled what the impact would be upon transport and other industries that also stand to benefit.

 

The next thing to understand is just how this would give us such a competitive advantage?

 

Well, at the moment we’re accessing around 20-25 GPS international satellites but we can’t always get the satellites or see them quickly enough and so there are gaps and holes; also they become less accurate and can eventually be a few to 10 or 20 metres out which is far too imprecise for the sort of mapping that the types of positioning robotics that agriculture or high quality construction and mining require.

 

We know in the next 5 years, in addition to the American GPS system the Russians are putting up their GLONASS system, the Europeans are putting up their Galileo system, the Chinese, Japanese and Indians are all putting up global or regional positioning systems. Australia will be one of the few developed countries in the world that will be able to see all these systems and satellites; provided we do the research and get our act together as a nation. So there are wonderful opportunities for precise positioning coming through.

 

This FIG conference brings together many of the best people in the world to advise and talk about how to do this and share with us how nations overseas are going about developing similar systems. There’ll be people from Europe, America, China, Japan, India and so on all participating in the conference. It’s the biggest conference of its kind in the world, it only comes around once every four years, it’s the Olympics for surveyors, and it’s coming here to Sydney. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for us to learn and press our case.

 

Australia doesn’t make investments in space based infrastructure at this time so it’s not as though we’re a current player in the field of satellites, but we do stand to be a downstream beneficiary from it, and there are probably some reciprocal international obligations that we should think about providing to others in this regard. That’ll be a hot topic for conversations around the conference and beyond.

 

For me, it is just so important that we think about how to elevate this debate and start figuring out how to anchor those benefits back in to Australia.