Practically anyone knows and, at least occasionally, uses GPS — the Global Positioning System — to navigate from one point to another. GPS is an American solution that relies solely on a satellite-based connection, but it comes with certain physical limitations. It can also be spoofed or disrupted, potentially leading to massive damages in the economy, but also other areas like safety, emergency, and the military. NextNav is a small company where the core thesis is to bring terrestrial GPS as a backup solution to the U.S. — exclusively and on existing infrastructure. Is the stock a potential multi-bagger in plain sight?
Summary and key takeaways from today’s Weekly
– The U.S. has no terrestrial GPS backup.
– There is a feasible solution in the making, even not requiring any tax-payer money or costly infrastructure built-up.
– However, the outcome is highly uncertain, creating a do or die setup for NN stock.
As I have been writing on numerous occasions, including last week’s episode (see here), I am a bit cautious with my stock selection.
Not only that I do not like to follow others into already crowded ideas in general.
But also in light of the disruptive forces that have shaken the investment environment more recently. No one can say that what is currently happening will be without serious implications for world economies and potentially stock markets, but very likely for most companies and stocks.
That’s why the third pillar among most of my stock picks, besides energy / commodities on one side, and Pharma / bio- and med-tech on the other, are what I grouped into ”special situations”. Companies with certain drivers and catalysts that are either almost independent of what broader markets do or at least are so powerful that they can meaningfully propel stocks higher, even if market sentiment remains sour.
Case in point, what about bringing terrestrial GPS to the U.S. as a catalyst?
NextNav (ISIN: US65345N1063, ticker: NN) positioned itself accordingly and quietly. If the respective commission green-lights the plan, the stock would likely navigate into entirely new spheres.
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per 25 March 2026 market close – since August 2022
Positioned to fill a missing void?
What is commonly referred to as “GPS” in everyday language is a service that seems so obvious and widespread like telephone connections or the internet.
However, this misses a point or two.
”GPS” is not of the same weight like, say, the “internet”. The internet is universally the same globally and there’s no category above it. But correctly, one should use the word “Global navigation satellite system(s)”, or GNSS in brief, to name the top layer of the popular satellite tech.
GPS is just the American GNSS solution.
It was invented around 50 years ago and brought to the public in the 80s and 90s. However, other big economic blocks have their own GNSS. Russia has GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS), the EU has Galileo, while China has the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, or just “BeiDou”.
The reason for so many different satellite systems is, GNSS have become too essential and of too high strategic importance to be shared with other countries. Especially, when being just a subordinated co-user, and not the driving force. Owning and operating satellites is an expression of sovereignty — and in times of unfortunately more military conflicts simply indispensable.
When asked about GNSS (or GPS), most would likely answer that is it a navigation service or technology — which of course is not a wrong answer.
But there’s more to it.
In fact, GNSS have even five tasks or areas of operation: navigation as the most obvious one, but also location, tracking, mapping, and timing. Determining a position differs from getting from point A to B, creating maps, monitoring the movement of goods or people, and just calculating time.
note: see here and here two interesting articles.
Besides navigating in a car and military usage, GNSS are essential in many other areas of our modern life like power grids, telecommunications, financial transactions, emergency and safety, etc.
GPS or GNSS, however, come with certain limitations.
Satellite-based systems do not have full coverage. Try using GPS deep inside a building, complex or underground. Or maybe in urban canyons. Chances are the connection gets lost or the map won’t be fully displayed due to weak signal strength.
While this might sound like a luxury problem, GNSS as an extraterrestrial, space-based and unencrypted service can be disrupted through jamming or spoofing — interference into the signal transmission. This could be done by another nation, but also natural phenomenons like solar flares or dense and dark clouds can impact satellite connection.
What many don’t know, and it sounds somehow odd, China and Russia have not just satellites, but also ground-based, i.e. terrestrial backup solutions that cannot be so easily disrupted.
The U.S., however, once known for technological excellence, has not.
This is where NextNav comes into play.
NextNav builds a terrestrial, i.e. ground-based solution for precise 3D positioning, navigation, and timing (called PNT). In it current form, it is a little-dynamic legacy service — working, but not solving the core issue. Right now, their service of the name Pinnacle delivers accurate floor-level location in buildings using phone barometers and beacons.
It’s already deployed in most major U.S. cities and helps speed up 911 emergency responses, and is able to overcome where satellites fall short. At least partially.
But what comes now is the crucial thing.
NextNav owns prime, so far underutilized, low-band 900 MHz spectrum licenses nationwide which it has acquired practically quietly in the past on the cheap.
900 MHz is a so-called low-frequency band which has a very high reach, but at the expense of transfer speed. Higher-frequency bands like 5 or 6 GHz (for example used for WiFi with significantly higher transfer rates), seldom even reach the garden or through multiple walls, because the waves in total are short and compressed for density and transfer speed.
As pictured below, NN’s PNT platform covers vast parts of the U.S.
NextNav owns the majority of licensed spectrum in the lower 900 MHz band (concretely, 902–928 MHz) after snapping up many active licenses nationwide. A couple of tiny other holders exist, but nothing close to NN’s scale. Someone else could buy the leftovers, but it’s not realistic for a national network.
NN’s holdings are the moat.
Their plan asks the FCC, the regulatory authority, in an ongoing petition to reconfigure the 900 MHz band for high-power 5G use which currently is not the case. 5G is known to be very fast, but having a short reach. This is due to it being used at higher frequencies.
There’s currently no low-frequency 5G as speed was the selling point for this tech.
As shown above, the current setup looks a bit fragmented.
NN intends to reorder or swap the spectrum, owning the light-blue frequencies exclusively, while the rest in darker blue would be used by lower-power services like door alarms, smart homes, toll tags, utilities, etc. in parallel without interfering into each other.
The real money and massive potential upside for the stock comes from leasing out most of its owned spectrum to established carriers for broadband, turning it into a dual-use cash machine.
NextNav isn’t building its own full-scale 5G network because it lacks the massive capital, nationwide infrastructure (towers, backhaul, core network), and operational expertise that major carriers like Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile already have.
Building from scratch would cost tens of billions and take years. This is far beyond what a small company with a market cap of 2.5 billion USD, ongoing losses, and limited revenue (4.6 million USD in 2025) can realistically do on its own.
Instead, their plan (via the ongoing FCC petition) is to get a nationwide flexible-use license in the reconfigured lower 900 MHz band as shown above. They’d use just a small portion of what they own for their NextGen 5G-based PNT system, delivering resilient 3D positioning, navigation, and timing as a GPS backup and / or complement.
The rest of the spectrum would be leased to existing telecom carriers for broadband capacity to achieve higher network coverage for 5G. NN would generate revenue through wholesale leasing deals — a high-margin, recurring income stream without the infrastructure buildout burden — essentially turning owned spectrum into cash flow to fund their own PNT operations, while using existing infrastructure like cell towers.
This would happen just inside the private sector, without any subsidies and tax-payer money.
That was the easy part.
Critics call this plan a “windfall” or an unfair gift (if approved), because there was no traditional spectrum auction. Carriers usually acquire frequencies for multi-billions before they can use them.
Here, NN just bought them on the open market while no one else cared.
Proponents on the other hand see it as efficient spectrum use without a burden to public finances. 5G PNT gets funded indirectly (NN’s edge), broadband gets more low-band capacity (carrier’s edge), and no taxpayer money is needed (everyone’s edge).
It’s a smart, asset-light plan.
If successful, NN monetizes their spectrum moat without the headaches of becoming a full carrier and NN stock likely goes through the roof. How much exactly, I don’t know. But just back the envelope, owning spectrum licenses that are worth billions of USD while having itself a market cap of just 2.5 billion USD, creates a very high-upside scenario.
But also a very high-risk one.
Logically and at first sight, the FCC should approve because America needs a GPS backup.
But disapproval or heavy conditions capping the upside is possible, too. Alarm / smart-home groups fear broken smoke detectors, door locks, etc. from high-power 5G interfering and potentially disrupting signals and device communication.
However, much bigger concerns include:
- Critical infrastructure hits: Utilities (smart meters, remote gas / electric shutoffs), tolling / railroads, freight logistics, and wildfire sensors could lose range or fail. Others have flagged transport and safety risks.
- Spectrum giveaway: An exclusive nationwide license worth billions to one company, with no prior auction. The government would surely be happy to cash in on this one, if somehow possible.
- Alternatives exist: Dozens of other PNT techs don’t require rule changes or risk harming other operating systems.
- Huge real-world costs: Conflicting engineering studies debate interference; re-tuning / replacing existing devices is not for free. Who pays for that?
Make no mistake, it is not just some small smart-home application lobbyists.
NN has really hard opposition — Apple, Boeing, the Wi-Fi Alliance or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, so effectively even parts of the government (while the FCC chair being in favor).
To maybe understand the interference situation, it’s similar to when too many users are in the same Wi-Fi network or connected to the same cellular tower. However, the plan here foresees different frequencies to mitigate the interference risk. NN claims the real-world issues are low, with the opposition massively overstating risks and threats, according to them.
The thing is, there is not enough real-world data, making it a guessing game.
Management seems highly optimistic about the outcome — and the market seems to agree, as the stock has been climbing, marking a new all-time high recently even.
The national security upside via the creation of a terrestrial GPS solution is compelling.
But legitimate technical, economic, and multi-agency worries — intense opposition — make a clean approval anything but a walk in the park.
Maybe even unlikely.
The realistic downside risk centers on either full regulatory failure or (more likely in my view) a severe dilution of a positive FCC outcome.
Limitations would cap or destroy much of the stock’s upside thesis.
The draft now under review could emerge heavily watered down with strict power limits (affecting 5G and potential licenses revenues), mandatory cost-sharing for coexistence with alarms and utilities (repurposing / repositioning them on the frequency band), spectrum carveouts or forced sales, or even an auction requirement that the company likely could not afford.
This would shrink the current valuable license into a regulated, lower-revenue asset.
Other potential outcomes are required expensive real-world testing to once and for all answer the question about frequency interference — costing precious time. Delays of any form and scope are not what NN needs, as the company has some net debt while generating only symbolic sales, …
… and having lived to a big part from diluting its shareholders.
In the worst case, full denial or prolonged litigation would freeze the entire NextGen PNT vision, with the stock then likely trading as a distressed micro-cap vulnerable to further dilution.
These limitations are real and driven by debatable, but legitimate technical concerns over billions of existing low-power devices, making any clean win far from guaranteed.
That’s why I pass on this one, watching the outcome, but lacking enough conviction.
Conclusion
The U.S. has no terrestrial GPS backup.
There is a feasible solution in the making, even not requiring any tax-payer money or costly infrastructure built-up.
However, the outcome is highly uncertain, creating a do or die setup for NN stock.
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