SHERIDAN, WYOMING – Feb. 24, 2025 Deutsche Telekom is expanding its Precise Positioning service for business customers to Eastern Europe in cooperation with Swift Navigation. Precise Positioning is based on Swift Navigation's Skylark correction service and improves the accuracy of navigation systems by up to 100 times.
Precise Navigation in the Centimeter Range
Positioning via satellites is now widespread worldwide, with more than 6 billion devices using systems such as the American GPS and the European Galileo system for positioning and route planning every day. Deutsche Telekom operates a network of antenna sites in Germany and large parts of Europe that offer a solution to compensate for the inaccuracies. With the help of the data measured at these locations, the position can be corrected to an accuracy of a few centimeters. This makes applications, such as robotic lawnmowers work without a boundary wire.
From the Arctic Circle to the Peloponnese
In recent years, antenna sites have been set up in large parts of northern, central, southern and western Europe. This network has now been extended to other countries in eastern Europe. At the same time, the accuracy of the service has been significantly increased to a maximum deviation of 2 cm in open skies. The countries include Croatia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia. The most south-easterly station is now located on Rhodes, the most westerly on the Azores and the most northerly near Hammerfest in the north of Norway.
Accuracy Increased Again: New Applications Become Possible
Today's satellite-based navigation systems, like GPS, generally achieve an accuracy of several meters, meaning that satellite-based positioning is too imprecise for cars, machines, robots or parcel drones to navigate autonomously and safely.
Inaccuracies are caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, deviations in the orbit of the satellites or reflections of the GNSS signal from buildings and window surfaces. The Skylark positioning solution from Swift provides correction information on a second-by-second basis, allowing a navigation system in a vehicle or a robotic lawnmower to compensate for these positioning errors.
How Precise Positioning Works
To do this, an evenly distributed network of special antennas collects data from the most important global navigation satellites and compares it with the precisely measured antenna location. High-precision correction data is calculated on the basis of the information collected in this way and sent in real time via mobile communications to cars, for example. In Europe, Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Funkturm operate a network of these special antennas, known as reference stations - with uniform and fail-safe coverage.
Applications of Precise Positioning
This technology is needed for a variety of applications, including:
- Autonomous driving of cars, but also, for example, robotic mowers without boundary wires.
- The use of autonomous drones in logistics.
- The surveying of construction sites.
- Vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2X), the permanent exchange of information between vehicles.
About Swift Navigation
Swift Navigation is a San Francisco-based technology company unlocking vehicle autonomy, robotics, precision logistics, and V2X communication with centimeter accurate positioning—globally and at scale. Its Skylark® Precise Positioning Service delivers accuracy 100 times more precise than standard Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS. Skylark is the only real-time, cloud-based positioning solution with ASIL certification, meeting ISO 26262:2018 functional safety standards for road vehicles. Powering over 10 million ADAS-enabled and autonomous vehicles worldwide, Skylark is trusted by more than 20 automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, leading robotics companies, and one of the world’s largest fleet operators.
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