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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 23 2018, @11:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the begun-the-gps-wars-have dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

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.

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).

[...] 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 (北斗 – "Big Dipper") navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/the-gps-wars-have-begun/


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  • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Monday December 24 2018, @12:10AM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 24 2018, @12:10AM (#777957) Journal

    I came to call the same thing out you did, this hasn't been true for a while.Heck, modern phones are typically designed to use multiple of these systems to improve their location detection and accuracy.

    I suppose technically it is true that the US does have a practical monopoly on the specific constellation of positioning satellites dubbed GPS. Just not on GPS style technologies such as Glonass, Galileo, Beidou also in orbit.

    The first article is dated 2012, which is likely where the somewhat dated perspective comes from.

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