NextNav’s National Security Theater
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is under attack. At least that’s the messaging coming from NextNav, a publicly traded positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) company. In April 2024, the company filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to restructure the lower 900-megahertz (MHz) band in order to host a terrestrial 5G-based system as a “complementary and backup” system for space-based GPS. The pitch sounds reasonable: America depends on a single system that’s vulnerable to outside attack, and NextNav has the solution—provided the FCC carves out a large block of unlicensed spectrum and hands it over.
The narrative seems compelling, but it’s inaccurate. NextNav is asking the government to hand them a monopoly to deploy a system that can’t fill in for GPS (but will hinder technological development) based on a vastly overstated national security argument.
Real Vulnerability, Imaginary Emergency
GPS does indeed have vulnerabilities. Jamming and spoofing GPS signals has become a practice of adversarial statecraft. It’s been seen during the Russia-Ukraine War as well as in the Baltic States and the Eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, China has demonstrated its capabilities and signaled its willingness to deny GPS in contested environments. These are legitimate national security concerns that have received significant attention in the past decade.
NextNav’s pitch rests upon this foundation but offers no solution to contested environments overseas. Instead, it focuses on deploying the solution to a battlefield problem in the continental United States, where GPS operates with 99.9998 percent availability. The threat model invoked by NextNav, in which the U.S. homeland suffers mass disruption of GPS, would require an adversarial action so significant that a 5G backup PNT system would be the least of our concerns.
This is an important distinction to make. A genuine national security gap should receive a coordinated response from the federal government. This would consist of a federally led interagency process—not a commercial infrastructure play by a single company wrapped in the language of strategic geopolitical competition that seeks to bypass regulatory scrutiny to gain a chunk of some of the most valuable spectrum available.
NextNav’s Ask
Without the national security imperatives, it becomes clear what NextNav is really asking for. The company has leveraged spectrum auctions and secondary market acquisitions to gain the dominant position as the largest licensee in the lower 900 MHz band. Its petition asks the FCC to restructure the band to grant NextNav 15 MHz of full-power, flexible-use licensed spectrum in exchange for its current low-power holdings.
This ask is massive. Critics have pointed out that NextNav’s PNT system would require only 5 percent of the 15 MHz allotment it seeks. This leaves the remaining 95 percent of the spectrum available for NextNav to lease to mobile network operators under flexible-use rules—a potentially more valuable broadband business that’s completely unrelated to PNT. The company’s own filings confirm its vision of monetizing the spectrum for 5G broadband.
This is a classic case of regulatory capture cloaked in the language of national security. NextNav seeks to prey on legitimate concerns about GPS dependency to gain a spectrum windfall and then monetize this shared public resource as their exclusive licensed spectrum. They’re trying to persuade the FCC to allow this using a security narrative that’s largely irrelevant to a major portion of their own business model.
A Band in Demand
It’s easy for those without radio frequency engineering experience to overlook the importance of the lower 900 MHz band. In plain language, the band is among the most densely populated unlicensed bands in the United States, servicing hundreds of millions of devices Americans use daily. Smart home systems, medical alert devices, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, railroad safety systems, electronic toll collection systems, and agricultural monitoring equipment all operate in this band today under Part 15 rules. It’s important to note that the debate around NextNav isn’t about Wi-Fi or your cellphone—the concern is the unlicensed spectrum that enables IoT in smart agriculture, industrial automation, building management, and medical monitoring. These are technologies built on the regulatory promise that shared unlicensed spectrum is stable enough to invest in. If the FCC were to adopt NextNav’s proposal, it would eliminate that stability and stifle innovation in IoT development.
Though NextNav has filed coexistence studies claiming its proposed 5G operations wouldn’t cause unacceptable interference with existing users, the industry disagrees. The RAIN, LoRa, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Wi-SUN alliances jointly filed a technical assessment in the FCC docket concluding that NextNav’s analysis understates real-world interference by relying on flawed assumptions about base station density, network loading, and outdoor deployment scenarios.
A GPS Backup That Doesn’t Back Up GPS
There’s an even more fundamental problem with NextNav’s pitch that gets less attention than it deserves: If implemented, the technology wouldn’t function as a national GPS backup. Instead, NextNav’s proposed network would broadcast a 5G positioning reference signal from terrestrial base stations. A device would determine its location through trilateration, which would require simultaneous reception from at least three base stations. The system would only work where 5G infrastructure exists at sufficient density to support that calculation. NextNav acknowledges this, describing coverage as “optimized where population and critical infrastructure are concentrated” and noting that rural coverage depends on future commercial 5G expansion.
As of 2023, the FCC’s National Broadband Map put 5G geographic coverage at roughly 34 percent of U.S. land area. The remaining 66 percent includes the Mountain West, the Great Plains, rural Appalachia, Alaska, and essentially every maritime approach to the American coastline—precisely the environments where a GPS backup would matter most. By NextNav’s own admission, its system offers nothing to assist in remote aviation, maritime navigation, wilderness emergency response, or energy infrastructure in rural corridors.
A helpful analogy for understanding the fundamental challenge of this system is Apple’s AirTag, which uses crowdsourced Bluetooth signals from nearby iPhones to approximate location. While an AirTag would work well in a Manhattan parking garage, where a large network of Bluetooth devices is available for it to triangulate from, it wouldn’t work in the wilderness of Wyoming where no such network exists. NextNav’s proposed system would create the same structural dependency, only working as a backstop for GPS where infrastructure already exists. Describing a system like this as a national GPS backup blatantly oversells its capability while conveniently inflating the justification enough to demand action from the FCC on national security grounds.
Existing GPS Alternatives
If policymakers agree that the national security concerns associated with America’s dependence on GPS are genuine, then the policy response must target them. While NextNav’s proposal doesn’t hold up to such an evaluation, the broader problem does deserve a real answer. Fortunately, real solutions already exist.
One viable alternative is eLORAN, a ground-based navigation system operating in the low-frequency 90-110 kilohertz band with signal strength three to five million times greater than GPS. It can penetrate buildings and operate underground, and it’s exceptionally difficult to jam or spoof. The U.S. government invested more than $160 million from 1997 through 2010 to modernize the existing LORAN-C infrastructure into eLORAN. The system was almost fully built out in the continental U.S. when the Obama administration terminated the program in 2010 against the explicit advice of the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation (DOT), and many government technologists. The justification for the cut was a mere $36 million per year in cost savings. The administration suggested that Americans could simply fall back on paper maps if GPS were interrupted.
Other nations around the globe have deployed their own GPS backup solutions. China completed its own eLORAN network in October 2024, extending coverage across the Taiwan Strait and integrating it with national fiber-optic infrastructure. South Korea has deployed eLORAN in direct response to North Korean jamming. Neither sought to use 900 MHz solutions like NextNav is proposing.
Another currently available solution is ATSC 3.0, a next-generation broadcast standard with a terrestrial PNT option that leverages existing broadcast infrastructure. Multiple commercial space-based solutions are also advancing, and the DOT has already awarded contracts to nine PNT vendors to demonstrate complementary technologies. A system-of-systems approach drawing on multiple independent technologies across diverse frequencies and infrastructure is both technically sound and genuinely resilient. That goal is best served by a competitive, technology-neutral process—not by handing one company a spectrum windfall and claiming it solves a national security problem.
What the FCC Should Do
The FCC’s decision to open a notice of inquiry rather than move directly to rulemaking on NextNav’s petition was the right call. What should follow is an open process that evaluates all complementary PNT technologies on their merits with technical scrutiny and without tilting the playing field toward any single petitioner. In March 2026, the FCC forwarded a draft NPRM to the White House Office of Management and Budget for interagency review. That process should produce rules that open competition across technologies rather than simply converting NextNav’s petition into federal policy.
America needs a more resilient PNT architecture, but it doesn’t need to sacrifice a productive, interoperable ecosystem of unlicensed devices to get there—particularly when the proposed beneficiary has been candid that most of the spectrum it seeks isn’t for PNT at all. The national security urgency NextNav invokes is real in the theaters where adversaries operate, but in the continental United States—where GPS functions with near-perfect reliability—it’s nothing more than a sales pitch.
GPS resilience is a legitimate national security policy priority; however, the solution needs to work and should not come with a blank check.