The GPS Wars Have Begun (techcrunch.com)

Where are you? That's not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position. From a report: Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities. That's a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here's the book-length treatment).

Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry. Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia's GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

Comments

All for one, and one for one.

[Ostracus]

Kind of funny that the Chinese don't trust the Russians either otherwise they'd be using theirs.

Re:All for one, and one for one.

[Entrope]

It's not really true any longer that the military signals provide better accuracy. DGPS approaches, including SBAS (FAA's WAAS being the first), can provide approximately the same accuracy as the military PPS, while also providing integrity assurances (in that domain's jargon, integrity means you have a bound on how wrong your calculated position is). The main advantage of the military signals now is improved availability, both in terms of anti-jamming and anti-spoofing measures.

There is some advantage for military receivers in that they can use L2 to estimate dispersion due to the ionosphere, which is easily the largest source of errors for SPS receivers, but an increasing number of satellites transmit civil signals on a second frequency or use "codeless" approaches to make the same estimations using the military encrypted signals on L1 and L2.

Re:Who cares?

[AmiMoJo]

There are a few of issues.

When it was just GPS it was easier to jam/spoof. Now we can compare data from multiple systems to detect spoofing. Other services can provide greater precision than the US wishes civilians to have, or remove other restrictions like the maximum altitude and speed limits.

It's a good thing.

Re: Payment

[guruevi]

The whole Brexit debacle is being handled by people that are bungling it purely out of spite. The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time but get bullied by your only reason and biggest dependent - Germany