When most companies talk about building infrastructure, they mean placing an order with an overseas manufacturer and waiting for a shipping container. Point One Navigation has never worked that way.
Since 2016, Point One has been tirelessly developing what might be the most rigorously engineered base station network in the precise positioning industry, one built on a simple but demanding conviction: that GNSS infrastructure is only as trustworthy as the people and processes behind it. That conviction shows up in every design decision, every component choice, and every field installation.
Power that doesn't quit
The base station design started with a fundamental question: what does it mean to build an industrial product that can survive outdoors, anywhere on earth, for decades?
The answer turned out to be power, or more precisely, the elimination of single points of failure in power delivery. Over nearly a decade of iteration, Point One evolved from two redundant power inputs to effectively four, building a proprietary in-house power management system capable of balancing energy storage and energy flow across all of them. The failover between sources is so seamless that the system sustains what amounts to zero power loss in transition. Moreover the backup power source within the base stations allows for five days of run-time, ensuring data transmission is uninterrupted. That engineering achievement, proven across Point One’s existing fleet, is a core reason the network maintains 99.9% uptime.
The power management board is designed and proved in-house, a deliberate choice that gives the team the flexibility to change battery chemistry for extreme climates, adapt to new configurations, and iterate rapidly without the friction of working through contract manufacturers or external project managers.
A network designed for the whole planet
Point One’s base stations ship with dual cellular modems and four SIM card slots, meaning they can connect to virtually any cellular network on any continent. The operations team and firmware developers have built the device to be sufficiently generic that it can be parachuted into a new location and come online almost anywhere in the world. That sounds straightforward until you’ve tried it. It isn’t.
What makes it possible is the same tight loop between design, engineering, and production that runs through everything Point One builds. There’s no mediator between the engineer who wrote the firmware and the technician troubleshooting a deployment in a new market. That proximity is a genuine competitive advantage, and it scales in ways that outsourced assembly never could.
Precision without monuments
In traditional survey-grade GPS, the gold standard is a monument. Think: concrete cast directly to bedrock, anchored well enough to move with tectonic plates. Point One’s base stations don’t work that way. They go on poles, fences, and buildings: faster to deploy, dramatically lower cost, but less inherently stable.
Rather than accepting that as a limitation, Point One engineered around it. The stations continuously auto-survey their position against government-maintained reference datums and run onboard sensors, the kind of motion detection technology found in high-end wearables, to detect and classify physical movement in real time, down to the millimeter. The system distinguishes wind vibration from a genuine displacement event and alerts the operations center accordingly. The result is a network that can grow at scale without sacrificing the positional integrity that precision applications demand.
Integrity in every installation
Hardware quality is only part of the story. Each base station uses a high end quad-band, quad-constellation GNSS receiver, and every antenna is installed to exacting specifications: level to the ground, consistently oriented across the fleet, eliminating the asymmetric errors that a careless installation would introduce invisibly. Our field technicians follow precise protocols so that the hardware performs the way the firmware expects it to. Having our own field technicians is another differentiating factor. Instead of outsourcing base station installations, Point One is able to deploy thousands of base stations with survey-grade accuracy.
Point One also operates with transparency about its network, a rarity in the industry. Coverage maps, site quality data, network status, and performance metrics are surfaced openly, no walled gardens, no black-box claims about network reliability. Open standards, verifiable data.
Made here, by us
The plastics in the base station enclosure are sourced from domestic vendors, some within 20 miles of Point One’s headquarters here in San Francisco. Prototyping happens in-house. Assembly happens in-house. Testing and final seal happen in-house. When a unit ships, it has passed through the hands of Point One’s own engineers and technicians, not a contract facility on another continent.
This matters for quality control. It matters for iteration speed. And it matters for something harder to quantify but easy to understand: accountability. When you build something yourself, with your own people, you have a different relationship to whether it works.
Strasbourg: exporting a philosophy, not just a product
What began as a manufacturing ethos in the United States is now taking root in Europe. Point One’s new facility in Strasbourg, France represents the next chapter of that same philosophy. Our Strasbourg HQ is not a satellite office tasked with light assembly, but a full manufacturing and deployment operation with approximately 80% of components built and sourced within France and a production speed of over 50 base stations deployed a month.
The Strasbourg operation didn’t simply inherit the American playbook. It rebuilt it locally. And nowhere is that commitment more visible than in a detail that might seem small but speaks volumes: the custom metal truss used to mount base stations is fabricated by a specialist just across the street from the Strasbourg factory. The truss design was developed collaboratively, the fabricator is close enough to walk to, and the feedback loop between design and production is measured in minutes rather than weeks. It’s the same integration of design and manufacturing that defines our US operation, reconstituted from local materials and local expertise on the other side of the Atlantic.
That kind of supply chain proximity isn’t accidental. It’s a deliberate hedge against the brittleness that comes from global dependency, and an expression of confidence that the best infrastructure is built by people who are close to it, invested in it, and accountable for it.
A different kind of scale
In an industry increasingly crowded with DePIN networks and distributed infrastructure plays that commoditize hardware and offshore production, Point One’s approach is a deliberate counterargument. Precision positioning infrastructure is not a commodity. The physics don’t care about your go-to-market story, they care about antenna alignment, power stability, positional integrity, the network density, and the expertise required to maintain all four at network scale.
With manufacturing operations now on two continents, each grounded in the same principles of local sourcing, in-house production, and tight design-engineering integration, Point One is demonstrating that this model scales. The network is growing, and the quality is traveling with it.