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The UK may deploy its own constellation of navigation satellites due to being excluded from the European Union's Galileo project:
Britain is considering setting up a satellite navigation system to rival the European Union's Galileo project amid a row over attempts to restrict Britain's access to sensitive security information after Brexit, the Financial Times reported.
[...] "The UK's preference is to remain in Galileo as part of a strong security partnership with Europe. If Galileo no longer meets our security requirements and UK industry cannot compete on a fair basis, it is logical to look at alternatives," she said.
The European Commission has started to exclude Britain and its companies from sensitive future work on Galileo ahead of the country's exit from the EU in a year's time, a move which UK business minister Greg Clark said threatened security collaboration.
"We have made it clear we do not accept the Commission's position on Galileo, which could seriously damage mutually beneficial collaboration on security and defence matters," he said in an emailed statement.
Although basic Galileo services are supposedly free and open to everyone with no risk of being disabled or degraded, higher-precision capability is available only to paying commercial users.
Now we have GPS, Galileo, BeiDou/COMPASS, GLONASS, IRNSS/NAVIC, QZSS, and possibly a British satnav system in the future. Devices can use multiple systems to achieve greater precision. Check out this comparison of systems.
Also at BBC and The Independent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Thursday April 26 2018, @02:23PM
This is a quote (somewhat ellipsized) from someone identified in TFA only as "A spokeswoman for Britain’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy":
A fair basis?
Before: You, the rest of Europe, and a few other nations like the US, China, and Russia had private in-house satellite location networks. Nobody else did.
You no doubt considered this "Fair", which it was: Each nation competing on its merits, whether it had satellites or not.
Now: You renounced your satellite network along with the Europe that goes with it. Now they have one and you don't.
You may not consider this "Fair", but the universe certainly does. Identical situation: Each nation competes on its merits. You just don't have your own satellites now, so you cry "unfair" like a child on a schoolyard, even though it was fine and "Fair" before--you're just in a different group.
That is not what "fair" and "unfair" mean.
If you truly believe that some nations not having satellites is "unfair" and damaging to businesses, then you would have set up a "fair satellite trade" program under Fair Trade when you had the chance, before leaving Europe, and given the satellite system to all the peoples of the world for their businesses to exploit in a "Fair" manner for trade.
You don't believe that any more than I do, and your decrying how "unfair" it is that your nation loses Galileo because it decided to leave Europe rings very false. You are embarrassing yourself and those you represent.
Leaving Europe may or may not have been a good idea overall--there are certainly valid points both in favor and against--but in the end, you decided to leave, and that means you can't keep their nice things for yourself. That's fair.