NextNav is the developer of Metropolitan Beacon System, a wide area location and timing technology designed to provide services in areas where GPS or other satellite location signals cannot be reliably received. MBS consumes significantly less power than GPS, and includes high-precision altitude. In the United States, NextNav operates its MBS network over its spectrum licenses in the 920-928 MHz band. NextNav was founded in 2008 by Ganesh Pattabiraman, Subramanian Meiyappan and Dr. Arun Raghupathy in Sunnyvale, CA. The founding team consists of technologists with a background in solving complex technological problems. Ganesh Pattabiraman, Co-Founder, Director and President/CEO of the Company, formerly worked at Qualcomm, where he managed location systems ranged from satellite-based systems with global scale to highly localized Bluetooth-based systems. Dr. Arun Raghupathy, Co-founder and VP of Systems Engineering, was originally at Qualcomm and most recently at Texas Instruments, where he managed TI’s GPS Chip development. Subbu Meiyappan, Co-founder and VP of Hardware Engineering, formerly worked with Airgo Networks which was acquired by Qualcomm. The company’s management team has experience in developing and rolling out nationwide networks and commercializing advanced technology.
The NextNav network uses Metropolitan Beacon System technology to deliver high precision three-dimensional indoor location capabilities across a market area. MBS is built on principles similar to GPS transmitting precisely timed signals from a network of wide-area beacons enabling receivers to use trilateration techniques to determine their precise location. This differs significantly from other approaches to indoor and urban location, which rely on short-range, local-area transmitters. Due to the terrestrial placement of the transmitters and sub-GHz nature of the signal, MBS signals can travel several kilometers and—because the network is specifically designed, deployed, and managed for indoor positioning—can be reliably received in deep indoor conditions that block satellite signals. MBS signals also enable location to be computed with far lower power drain than GPS. In addition, the system incorporates barometric pressure compensation technology that allows receivers equipped with pressure sensors to compute their altitude very precisely, typically within a floor. A byproduct of the GPS-like operating principles of NextNav’s MBS network is the ability to deliver high-precision timing to indoor locations or in the event of GPS outages. MBS receivers are being commercialized as an additional constellation added to multi-constellation GNSS processors. Today’s GPS processors typically process additional satellite constellations, and the MBS processing capability constitutes primarily firmware additions. The performance of the technology under emergency dialing conditions was originally demonstrated in the CSRIC III test bed in San Francisco in 2012, with performance enhancements added on an ongoing basis. More recently the technology was enabled in the primary global telecommunication standards bodies, 3GPP and OMA. MBS signal technology is available under FRAND terms. The technology can be scaled for any location application, including services to mobile phones, Internet of Things, and enterprise and public safety applications.
Coverage
NextNav's Urban and Indoor Positioning service is now available in San Francisco Bay Area, McLean, VA and other select markets. The Company has an initial presence in 45 additional markets in the US and is in deployment.
