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The Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (NTRIP)[1] is a protocol for streaming satellite navigation (GNSS) data over the Internet. NTRIP is a generic, stateless protocol based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1) based on the RTCM SC-104 protocol for GNSS data streams.[2]

The specification is standardized by the Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services (RTCM).[1] NTRIP was developed by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG)[3] and the Dortmund University Department of Computer Science.[4] NTRIP was released in September 2004; the initial version was based on HTTP over TCP.[5] As of April 2026, the latest version is RTCM 10410.1 Standard for Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (Ntrip) Version 2.0 with Amendment 2, January 12, 2021 (US$ 215.00). Version 2.0 can be based on HTTP/1.1 over TCP, HTTP/1.1 over UDP (HTTPU), or Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).[6]

Availability

A simplified version of NTRIP 1.0 used to be available for free. It does not have any protocol details or examples, and refers to purchase the document from RTCM.[7]

RTCM-NTRIP provides open-source (GPL v2) implementations of NTRIP: a minimal client-server pair (ntripclient and ntripserver) and a feature-rich BKG Ntrip Client (BNC).[8] The open-source Real-time Kinematic Library (RTKLIB) also implements NTRIP. Under GPLv2, it is legal to reverse-engineer the protocol using the code provided.

Another open-source (Apache License v2) implementation of NTRIP is provided by the Orekit[9] space-flight dynamics library[10], allowing to parse RTCM correction messages[11], RTCM ephemeris messages[12] as well as IGS generic SSR messages[13].

Service providers

Data from International GNSS Service can be obtained from five providers for free (some of which require registration): BKG, CAS, NASA CDDIS, Geoscience Australia, UCAR. There are site-specific streams containing observation data (for dGPS/RTK) and state-space data (for PPP) as well as combined state-space streams. Multi-GNSS is used.[14]

References