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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.
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...
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."
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!
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
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.
The Europeans have the advantage of learning from the mistakes made by the Air Force, as well as newer technology. GALILEO is a win-win for users, because it is causing the acceleration of the GPS program, GPS-III should be operational years ahead of schedule (and many augmentations originally slated for block III are now in IIF - launch starts 2007). When combined GALILEO/GPS recievers are released to market, the accuracy commonly available to civilians will increase because of the added frequencies and potentially better geometry. Another potential benefit could be a dramatically reduced barrier to entry in the GPS/GNSS reciever manufacturing and design industry. The current players are working hard now to keep their dominance when the new systems are operational.
As for the Chinese, I don't think they will 'struggle' all that much, but I guess time will tell. The fact that they will have a free to use segment just means that the system will actually be used by the public, instead of primarily the military.