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Chinese GPS System To Be Offered Free
MattSparkes writes, "The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, 'Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago.'"
I can see it now, a billion people running into each other looking down at there GPS device.
Each of their citizens will get a free tracking device implanted inside them. What a great country!!
Aren't they afraid of how all those people are going react when they find out they live in China?
You mean China is going to make, manufacture, and use technology themselves without paying us royalties? I'm outraged. We're screwed.
What if the government censors it, you might accidently walk off a cliff or something
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
The Chinese are taking power away from corporations and giving it to their people, by making public services available for free. That is almost the opposite of what happens in the West.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I'm really looking forward to those "universal antennas" of all frequencies at once, run through parallel "software radios". I want my mobile devices to get competing GPS data for averaging. It's like having two or three eyes in the land of the blind.
--
make install -not war
...it will make them better drivers.
The economic benefit of free location services is so great, it makes sense for a country to provide this the same way as it provides a national highway system.
Furthermore, it'd simply be absurd to make your businesses pay all the costs to field a system they aren't allowed to use, and have them pay fees to get similar service from a foreign country. Such a policy would serve neither security nor economic interests. I'm all for private development of technologies, but I can't feel too badly for Galileo investors if they were counting on China to act in such an irrational way.
The resolution of the Chinese system isn't so great, so clearly there's a business opportunity for the private sector there to create subscription services, either to a competing system or to some kind of terrestially based correction service.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seriously, how many different navigation systems do we need?
Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo. And the Russians don't want to admit that the Europeans could be better than them at anything, so they're keeping GLONASS around. The Chinese don't trust anybody, and nobody trusts the Chinese, so they have Beidou. The only thing we're missing is one by India (to compete with the Chinese), or maybe one just by France that's purposely incompatible with the rest of Europe's (is "SENAV" taken?).
How soon until the satellites start running into each other? (Yes, I know they won't really; it'll probably be radio spectrum that we run out of first.)
At least as it looks right now, the only system that's even going to be an improvement over GPS is Galileo, and even then it won't be by much. Seems like it would be a whole lot more productive to build systems that augment the signal already available from GPS, and then can call back to providing position itself if GPS goes out; then you'd be able to get higher precision. With higher precision signals, a whole lot of interesting things become possible: you can have automatic self-driving farm equipment (like John Deere's ground-based StarFire augmentation system), lower-cost aircraft navigation, all sorts of cool remote-sensing applications. If you thought that GPS in itself was cool, there are far more opportunities to use it, when you start talking about inch-accurate systems.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I can see it now, 300 million people running into each other looking down at there GPS device.
The "joke" doesn't seem so funny now does it? It's amazing how making a stupid comment about another country and/or ethnicity passes as "funny" these days.
Since when have the Chinese bothered with piddling little things like royalties?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But things appear to have changed in Beijing. On 2 November, the country's official news agency Xinhua reported that Beidou would, from 2008, begin providing an "open" level of service, with 10-metre accuracy, in addition to its "authorised", encrypted military service.
10 Meter accuracy? That sucks to honest. I just about get 3 meter accuracy all the time with my $150 unit, today. Why would I want to use this and pay a license fee to do so?
Linux O Muerte!
Invest some $$ in project X then subvert the system and cause damage from within.
This applies to this situation and the M$/Novell deal..
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. And enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
They are trying to reduce.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The trouble with China offering free GPS is it's all gonna be censored. Anything the government deems unacceptable won't show up on the GPS device. Things like lakes and rivers will both be blotted out since they are commonly associated with revolution and high volume disobediance. The houses of suspected revolunionaries also won't show up, so they'll have to actually tell friends and relatives directions to their house rather than just let them use GPS to find their way. On the ironic side the government won't be able to come and arrest the revolutionaries since after their houses are blotted out they won't know where they live either.
It is indeed a dark day for GPS
China, a known totalitatian dictatorship, is making and freely supplying to its citizens, a system by which those citizens' geographic location can be constantly tracked.
Does ANYONE think that the Chinese government might have an ulterior motive?
Technoli
They take power from corporations and give it to the Peoples Liberation Army. By the way, GPS is free.
It took decades for the Air Force to learn how to manage a constellation of 24 satellites. It should be fun to watch China and Europe struggle with it.
an ill wind that blows no good
There they go again, another racist comment. Will somebody please think of the chinese.
It seems to me that if you had a GPS device that could understand signals from all of the systems you would have a large increase in precision. Each system says you are at point A +/- some distance (effectively a circle with point A in the middle). Unless point A is EXACTLY the same for each system, and I can't imagine it would be, then you get three overlapping circles. You now know that you can only be in the area where the three circles overlap. Any area outside of the overlap is now known to be wrong. Am I right?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
China is a totalitarian capitalist state... Hmm, I wondered where Rove got his ideas from.
Deleted
Inside joke. The Chinese word for compass is "south pointing device". Thats because they first used it for geomancy, where "good energy" comes from the south. The Vikings and other Europeans used the compass as a navigational aid for when the north star was occluded, so the European compass points north.
From Wiki, In September 2003, China joined the Galileo project. China will invest 230 million (USD296 million, GBP160 million) in the project over the next few years. Does this mean China will bail out of the Galileo project and develop their own Beidou? Is Beidou already operational?
What happens when you try to locate Tienanmen Square?
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
What's wrong with China? Oh I don't know, maybe this? How about this? Or maybe you'd prefer more Economist?
Of course there are a few successful localized industries... but as with many other poor countries, there are a few developed areas, while the rest of the country is still in the stone age.
That's pretty interesting.
Actually, systems like the Japanese one are really the sort of alternatives I was proposing to the wheel-reinvention of simply making "another GPS."
From an an article on Japan's system, "although the QZSS is seen primarily as an augmentation to GPS, without requirements or plans for it to work in standalone mode, QZSS can provide limited accuracy positioning on its own." That seems like a good approach, which the Europeans might want to consider. Rather than simply pretending GPS doesn't exist, it augments it when available, providing an enhanced level of service and enabling new applications. (*cough* self-driving cars... *cough*) However it could also fall back and provide actual positioning in the absence of GPS if really necessary. (Although the Japanese don't seem particularly concerned in that regard, it shows that such a system would be capable of it.)
If that's the kind of system that China is building, then more power to them; I think the Europeans would be smart to follow the same path. Although actually, what would be best, is if the various national governments making their incompatible national GPS-augmentation systems, agreed on a univeral standard (or at least standard frequency band, so the receivers could be physically the same). Probably wishful thinking there, but a system like that would probably lengthen the life of the current-generation GPS system while providing the kind of accuracy that won't be available worldwide without a huge investment in new satellites (GPSIII).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Is fine for a GPS unit, my average here in Costa Rica, with a Garmin Rino 130 is 13 meters. In the us the precision is better due to the WAAS
Check out Website development, maintenance and accesibility cons
You think it's an idea that would only be tried in China? Why not put tracking devices in all watches, all headphones, all ipods, all electronics, and connect that to GPS so you know where ever human on earth is, 100% of the time?
You have to admit, it would be very good for security.
The Chinese government is basically planting a bug inside every car. I wouldn't be surprised if this were true.
China is screwing over Europe on our behalf, they could have always paid us to use our GPS. thanks china, and puhlease, tracking the chinese, you dont need to, just open your door and you'll find one, its a billion people for god's sake.
check the US govt, they're more likely to spy on you, because they already do
With so many satellites moving in the sky... Will I be able to get my summer suntan?
The European system, in which the Chinese also invested, is going to be pretty useless since it was crippled deliberately (under american pressure), such that it can still be jammed without jamming GPS, i.e. the independence from the US system has been removed.
Europe has never maintained a large coordinated constellation of satellites and kept them operating continuously. It took the US Air Force 2 decades to perfect the logistics of launching, operating, retiring, and renewing GPS. I don't see a new, untested, marginally funded, civilian organization having fewer problems. In my opinion Galileo is another in the line of "me too" technical projects like Concorde and the A380 doomed to failure.
It is pretty obvious that Galileo will not be viable without military participation. Because it will be used by potential adversaries the US is in the regrettable position of planning countermeasures it in time of war.
an ill wind that blows no good