Galileo system 'in a deep crisis'
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: york
Age: 50
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The problems i can see with road pricing over the entire uk road network using GPS systems are many. To start with, the proposals i have heard of are to charge for different roads at different rates at different times of day. So can any one of you imagine this government, who have a suspect record on matters IT!, putting a workable system in place that can handle 20 million vehicles per day with the many variables mentioned above? All the commuters, school runs, commercial trucks, taxiis, motorcycles, scooters and any other type of vehicle you can think of. All making journeys of variable charging parameters? I travel from Scarborough to London most Monday mornings, leaving at 5am arriving usually around midday. Using all types of road at all times of the charging scale! and i am not unique as i share the roads with millions of other travellers and thats just the commuting type of people.
So i ask you Gentlemen, who really believes this government could successfully implement such a system that could accuratly produce invoices for over 20 million vehicles each day, some making many more than 1 jouney per day! I very much doubt it!!
The other point of contention is how will this data be collected from all these vehicles? GPRS Doesnt have the capacity to handle millions of data packets per hour country wide. That would be an increase in radio traffic akin to more than doubling the entire uk mobile phone network capacity, the spectrum would collapse! So if it isnt a direct live transmission, then data logging would be needed and a quick trip to your local phone un-blocking shop( the most obvious type of establishment to cover this type of work!) and your datalogger, or BLack Box, would be showing a nicely reduced figure!
So i ask you Gentlemen, who really believes this government could successfully implement such a system that could accuratly produce invoices for over 20 million vehicles each day, some making many more than 1 jouney per day! I very much doubt it!!
The other point of contention is how will this data be collected from all these vehicles? GPRS Doesnt have the capacity to handle millions of data packets per hour country wide. That would be an increase in radio traffic akin to more than doubling the entire uk mobile phone network capacity, the spectrum would collapse! So if it isnt a direct live transmission, then data logging would be needed and a quick trip to your local phone un-blocking shop( the most obvious type of establishment to cover this type of work!) and your datalogger, or BLack Box, would be showing a nicely reduced figure!
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: EuroGA.org
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Very true.
Actually it could be done. I've been involved in secure communication gear design, tamper-proof enclosures, etc, and a lot of stuff is possible using a combination of physical security and strong crypto, but it's a load of hassle and hard to implement over so many users. Look, 20 years after PGP came out we still don't have a unified secure email system.
They can just about pull it off on Sky TV now, but that involves just reception of a signal which the viewer wants to see anyway, and decoding it. With GPS reception in this case providing zero benefit to the user (he can always use a separate device running Tomtom or whatever) this is a difficult one to make work. Just blocking GPS reception on the vehicle will create a situation where it will be extremely hard to prove that any driving was done.
My view is that universal road pricing will be abandoned when they realise that any scheme short of hugely complex will have trivial work-arounds.
The whole Galileo project is so dumb it's hard to believe that apparently clever people are doing it.
If OTOH they said something like "we want more redundancy than the US are going to provide and we are going to make the EU taxpayer pay for it" then one could discuss it on those terms. But they are doing it by plugging an obviously massively bogus business model.
Never under-estimate the power of job creation!
Actually it could be done. I've been involved in secure communication gear design, tamper-proof enclosures, etc, and a lot of stuff is possible using a combination of physical security and strong crypto, but it's a load of hassle and hard to implement over so many users. Look, 20 years after PGP came out we still don't have a unified secure email system.
They can just about pull it off on Sky TV now, but that involves just reception of a signal which the viewer wants to see anyway, and decoding it. With GPS reception in this case providing zero benefit to the user (he can always use a separate device running Tomtom or whatever) this is a difficult one to make work. Just blocking GPS reception on the vehicle will create a situation where it will be extremely hard to prove that any driving was done.
My view is that universal road pricing will be abandoned when they realise that any scheme short of hugely complex will have trivial work-arounds.
The whole Galileo project is so dumb it's hard to believe that apparently clever people are doing it.
If OTOH they said something like "we want more redundancy than the US are going to provide and we are going to make the EU taxpayer pay for it" then one could discuss it on those terms. But they are doing it by plugging an obviously massively bogus business model.
Never under-estimate the power of job creation!
