GNSS beyond navigation: the Galileo and EGNOS business opportunity

GNSS is bigger than the map app on your phone

Ask most people what GNSS is for and they will say "the blue dot on Google Maps." That undersells what is actually available today, for free, from the EU's own satellite navigation programmes. Between Galileo and its companion system EGNOS, there is a stack of capability — worldwide decimetre-level accuracy, cryptographic signal authentication, low-power positioning designed for battery-constrained devices, and chipset-level data access on ordinary phones — that most builders have never opened up. EU Space Academy's free course, Galileo: Building with GNSS Data, walks through exactly this stack. Here is the founder's version: what each piece is, and where the product opportunity sits.

Galileo and EGNOS, in one paragraph each

Galileo is the EU's own global satellite navigation system — a constellation broadcasting positioning, navigation and timing signals worldwide, alongside GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou. It already provides four services: an Open Service (free, for anyone), a Public Regulated Service (restricted, for government use), Search and Rescue support, and — the newest addition, declared operational in 2023 — the High Accuracy Service, covered below. EGNOS is a different layer entirely: Europe's Satellite Based Augmentation System, broadcasting correction and integrity data from geostationary satellites to sharpen the accuracy and trustworthiness of GNSS signals over the European region, per EU Space Academy's course material. Where Galileo is a constellation you receive signals from directly, EGNOS is a correction service that rides on top of it.

SBAS explained: the accuracy tier most builders skip past

"SBAS" is a category, not a single system — the US runs WAAS, Japan runs MSAS, and Europe runs EGNOS. All of them do the same basic job: geostationary satellites broadcast correction and integrity data that lets a suitably equipped receiver improve on raw GNSS accuracy and — just as importantly — know how much to trust the fix it is getting. That trust signal is why SBAS became foundational for use cases like aviation approach guidance, where knowing a position might be wrong matters as much as the position itself. For a product builder, SBAS is best thought of as the accuracy tier that sits between "whatever a phone gives you for free" and "a full survey-grade setup" — relevant anywhere a modest, trustworthy accuracy step-up is the actual requirement, from maritime navigation to agricultural guidance.

The Galileo High Accuracy Service: free decimetre accuracy, no subscription

This is the newest piece of the Galileo portfolio, and arguably the most immediately useful for builders. The High Accuracy Service (HAS) broadcasts precise correction data for satellite orbits, clocks and signal biases — via Galileo's E6-B signal and, in parallel, over the internet — free of charge, worldwide, since its declaration in 2023. Applied through a Precise Point Positioning (PPP) algorithm at the receiver, it takes typical GNSS accuracy down by roughly an order of magnitude, backed by a global network of 15 ground sensor stations.

Accuracy tiers as described in EU Space Academy's Galileo High Accuracy Service lecture. Figures are illustrative orders of magnitude, not guaranteed performance specifications.

EUSPA has flagged precision agriculture (combining accurate positioning with Earth observation for variable-rate farming) and automated mobility as priority use cases, and has committed to releasing a free reference PPP algorithm specifically to lower the barrier for smaller developers and SMEs who cannot build one from scratch in-house. If a product idea has ever stalled on "we cannot afford a metre-level correction subscription," HAS is worth a second look.

Signal authentication: the other reason Galileo matters right now

Galileo is also addressing a problem GPS was not originally built to handle: letting a receiver know whether the navigation signal it is decoding is genuine. GNSS signals are weak and can be jammed (blocked) or spoofed (faked), and the course cites real documented cases — a 2013 University of Texas research experiment that redirected a yacht's course, an unintentional interference event at a 2019 GNSS conference in Poland that shifted receivers' displayed positions, and more recent reports of aircraft navigation systems encountering jamming and spoofing in the field, serious enough that pilots had to fall back to other means of navigation. Galileo's answer is OSNMA (Open Service Navigation Message Authentication): a cryptographic signature broadcast on the widely supported E1B signal that lets any receiver verify navigation data really did come from Galileo, with no accuracy cost to standard users and no secret keys to store on the device. Reported availability has been high — EUSPA's own performance monitoring found users received fresh authentication data for every visible satellite at least once every 600 seconds between 97% and 99.8% of the time in the period it measured. For applications where trust in the position matters as much as the position itself — logistics, insurance telematics, critical infrastructure — that is a real, freely available building block, and Galileo's roadmap already points toward extending authentication to the ranging signal itself, not just the navigation message.

Low-power GNSS: how a tracker survives for years on a battery

The developer-focused half of the course gets specific about a problem every asset-tracker and wearable founder runs into: acquiring a GNSS fix from scratch is the most power-hungry thing a location chip does, because downloading orbital data over the slow satellite broadcast can take around 30 seconds with the radio fully powered on. Two families of technique work around this. Assisted GNSS fetches that orbital data over a cellular or similar network instead of waiting on the satellite broadcast. Snapshot positioning goes further: the device captures as little as a couple of milliseconds of raw signal and hands the heavy computation off elsewhere, splitting the classic receiver pipeline — capture, process, estimate position — across the device and the network in one of three configurations.

Some chipsets can even predict satellite ephemeris up to 28 days ahead, cutting network dependence further — a technique already used in some LoRa and Sigfox tracking devices per the course material. The practical design rule it offers: if a product needs sub-metre accuracy, budget for multi-constellation, multi-frequency hardware; if multi-metre accuracy is acceptable — true for most asset tracking — a single-frequency, multi-constellation receiver paired with the right low-power technique is enough. Critically, the choice of IoT network is not a separate decision from the choice of GNSS technique: narrowband options like Sigfox and LoRa rule out several of the techniques above outright.

Raw measurements: precision GNSS moves from lab kit to Android phones

Since Android 7, Google has exposed GNSS raw measurements — pseudoranges, carrier phase, hardware clock data — directly from a phone's chipset. Before that, the standard location API behaved like a black box: it handed back a computed position and nothing else. That change opened code-based, differential and precise-point-positioning techniques, previously the preserve of dedicated survey receivers, to any developer building on a mass-market phone. It is not universal: availability depends on the specific chipset, the manufacturer's implementation, and the Android version, and raw measurement support only became mandatory across the board from Android 10 onward. Phones that "duty-cycle" their GNSS chip to save battery also break the continuous carrier-phase tracking that the most precise techniques need, so reliable use requires either a device with duty-cycling disabled or the forced full-measurement option introduced in Android 12.

Where it is supported, the course points to concrete uses already emerging: augmented reality anchored to real-world position, mobile health, asset management, integrity monitoring, and Galileo-only positioning that takes advantage of its extra E5 frequency and authentication features. Free, open-source logging tools — including Google's own GnssLogger — already exist to capture this data for further analysis.

What a European builder should do with this

1. Treat HAS as a default, not a premium tier. If an architecture assumes a paid correction subscription is required for better-than-phone accuracy, check whether free Galileo HAS corrections already get there.
2. Design the network and the GNSS technique together. Do not pick a low-power IoT network first and a positioning technique second — narrowband options like Sigfox and LoRa rule out several techniques outright, so the two decisions are really one.
3. Treat authentication as a differentiator, not an afterthought. For anything touching logistics, insurance, or safety-adjacent use cases, OSNMA-aware positioning is a concrete, low-cost way to claim location data that cannot be silently spoofed.
4. Prototype on Android before committing to custom hardware. Raw GNSS measurements make it possible to validate a precision-positioning idea on an off-the-shelf phone before investing in a bespoke receiver.

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