Starlink shuts down its GPS-style cheat code. Researchers may unlock it anyway.
Shutdown of Starlink location feature won’t dampen interest in GPS alternatives.
Starlink is unceremoniously shutting down a GPS-style feature that most of the Internet satellite provider’s customers probably never realized existed. But that won’t stop broader momentum toward harnessing Starlink’s satellite constellation as a navigation alternative—especially when GPS jamming and spoofing have become more widespread.
The Starlink satellite constellation owned by SpaceX is designed to provide communications services first and foremost, rather than pinpointing users’ locations like GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). However, SpaceX publicly acknowledged in a May 2025 letter to the US Federal Communications Commission that Starlink could deliver positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. A handful of savvy Starlink customers had even been accessing Starlink PNT capability for several years until Starlink recently decided to shut down access, according to PCMag.
“The beauty of Starlink as a backup to GNSS is that it's such a different system—frequencies 10 times higher, bandwidths 10 to 100 times wider, power 100 to 1,000 times stronger, satellites 100 times more proliferated,” said Todd Humphreys, director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) and the Radionavigation Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, in correspondence with Ars.
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report