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> Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one? We certain

• ultrarunner 5y ago
  What is seen is a generally workable GNSS solution, especially after the removal of selective availability (note: this is a good thing, but by no means necessary; BeiDou still suffers from intentional degradation). What is not seen is a potentially better service that doesn't cost $1 billion a year which wasn't created. GPS radios are fairly power hungry, slow to sync without ephemeris, and accuracy can vary especially near buildings and terrain. But it works well enough and is entrenched enough that a private improvement would struggle to make financial sense. A utility of this scale also creates a single point of failure, which came to bear during the Galileo outage a few years ago. What some call needless competition is seen by others as redundancy & robustness. The water provider in Flint, MI should have gone out of business and been replaced for pumping lead into peoples' homes, but instead the situation became a political football. The only cost to bad actors was the expenditure of political capital; all but one minor charge was dropped. There are lots of trade offs, so the ways we'd be better off change depending on the way the system is defined. I do think the consideration of what might have been is interesting nonetheless.