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China's Beidou GPS-substitute opens to public in Asia
- kalleboo 14y agoI don't know why anyone would trust this system. China already requires maps to be "fuzzed" for location (if you use Google Maps on your phone in China, your location on the map will be up to 1km wrong), so there doesn't seem to be anything stopping them from doing the same here when they feel it's a sensitive time or area.
- wmf 14y agoThe Chinese military will trust it and Chinese consumers will be coerced into using it just like all the other homegrown standards.
- kalleboo 14y agoOriginally the american GPS system had a encrypted higher-precision signal for military use, and and an open lower-precision signal for civilian use, which could be independently shut off. One day they decided to open up the full precision to everyone. I don't know if the Chinese system is set up similarly, but it's a possibility that the military gets different data from civilians.
- estel 14y agoIf the cost of receivers comes down sharply, devices might try to use as many networks as possible to get an accurate fix as rapidly as possible. I can definitely see GPS-Beidou-Galileo together.
- celoyd 14y agoDefinitely. Mid-range and high-end receivers (for things like ecology surveys and continental drift tracking) integrate GLONASS and GPS already. I don’t have the RF/SP domain knowledge to back this up, but I speculate that multiple low-end receivers for 2–4 of these networks on a single chip might be more useful in practice than a single good receiver for any one network. In other words, a $20 Galileo chip + a $20 GPS chip might give me a faster time-to-fix than a $40 GPS chip. (In terms of units shipped, most GPS goes into phones, where time-to-fix is way more important than centimeter accuracy.)
- pilsetnieks 14y agoEven phones, if they want to be sold in Russia, integrate GLONASS and GPS now.
- rwg 14y agoThere's no reason mobile phones with GPS-only chipsets can't be sold in Russia -- they just get hit with ~25% import duties that phones with GLONASS-supporting chipsets don't have. I wouldn't be surprised at all if China does something similar with Beidou and mobile phones sold in China.
- shawn-butler 14y agoiOS and iPhone hardware since the 4s has supported both aGPRS and GLONASS. Qualcomm snapdragon parts also supported both (so the S2 maybe?) Faster time to fix translates into longer battery life. Whether this matters in practice for much of the Continental US I don't know.
- kamjam 14y agoThis was my initial impression too, but I got the feeling from the article that the Chinese government probably really don't care if no one else uses it, it's for use by their own military and as a means of "protection" against thew US shutting off GPS services to them - highly critical if they want to build those drones which rely on GPS. As an aside, how does the US government make money from the GPS? As a consumer, I pay no money, so I can only assume the GPS chip manufacturers pay some sort of royalty fee?
- sethg 14y agoThe government doesn’t charge anything for GPS: http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/ http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/
- jtl09 14y agoyes that is true if you dont count the money you paid for the chain products of GPS.
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- michael_miller 14y agoI don't think the purpose was primarily military-related. The US's GPS system can be jammed as is, and I don't see any reason why this system would be any different. GPS satellites are very far up in the atmosphere and thus produce a very weak signal to near-earth. This isn't just a theoretical attack: a few years ago, a truck driver with a GPS jammer accidentally jammed the GPSs of planes above him landing at Newark [1]. I think it's more a matter of national pride issue: to show the world that China doesn't have to rely on the US for technology. Russia's GLONASS system (briefly referenced in the article) is more or less the same thing. The good news is that this system, like GLONASS, will likely improve positioning speed / reliability, since there will be more navigation satellites in the sky. Already, receivers can tie GLONASS and GPS together; it's only a matter of time before Beidou is integrated as well. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/18304246 http://www.economist.com/node/18304246
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- jtl09 14y agoNot just because U.S. exports the cheapest beef, the other countries no longer raise their cow.
- vivaforever 14y agoIf BeiDou happens to be more advanced than GPS in the future, I bet more people would say, China must have stolen GPS technologies from US, there's no way that the Chinese could ever do something great, just the way as YE SHIWEN won gold medal in London Olympics, the first reaction was not congratulations, but suspecting she must have taken drugs! They didn't find any evidence in exhaustive testings, they claimed that, she had been genetically changed by Chinese government!
- CountSessine 14y agoThe beautiful thing is that with 4 more or less independent global navigation satellite systems in play (GPS, Galileo, Compass/Beidou, and GLONASS), there will be more than 70+ satellites in orbit providing ultra-reliable, ultra-accurate navigation and positioning and you won't necessarily have to trust any one of those networks individually.
- dfc 14y agoDo you have a receiver that works with all four systems?
- justincormack 14y agosoftware defined radio would be a good bet for that.
- kalleboo 14y agoI'm curious how soon mobile phones will have so many tuners that SDR is worth it. A typical phone now has what, 4 GSM bands, 3 UMTS bands, 3 LTE bands, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, GLONASS, FM Radio, 1seg, NFC...
- justincormack 14y agoThey would probably have more if they were cheaper, all sorts of countries have random frequency bands being freed up for mobile. But I think power consumption still the limiting factor.
- rwg 14y agoSuch a thing doesn't exist. For one, neither Beidou nor Galileo are operational GNSSes, so there is no economic incentive to create receivers that work with those services. Also, the Chinese government only just today published Beidou's ICD, the document that specifies the open-access Beidou signals: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3331 http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3331
- jtl09 14y agoPlease keep goosey. You didn't how happy the Chinese are now. you can't see they've become stronger because your eyes were blinded by your arrogance and the fear of rising of China.
- vivaforever 14y agoThis is just another example of ignorant westerners demonize China. 1km wrong? are you fucking serious? I use GPS everyday and didn't find any problem. You're just kind of idiots who think anything related to China must be evil, without any reason, and think the Chinese government has nothing better to do but vandalizing anything.
- peteretep 14y agoThis would make rather more sense if you replied to the comment you were commenting on...
- jtl09 14y agoyou've read it . did you?
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoWumao dang (50 cent party) invading hackernews?
- jtl09 14y agoTraitors visited here too. lol
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoCalm down. This is actually a fair site, but the standards are high.
- vivaforever 14y agoThis guy actually has done something really cool, if he is the guy: http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/ http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/. I've been learning Scala all the time, I remember I have read a lot of stuff written by this guy. I think he is now probably very twisted and having a hard time in China, he had to fake a smile while working with Chinese, but posting all kinds of negative news against China to express how he hates this country.
- kqr2 14y agoFor information on the various satellite navigation systems available: GPS (United States) GLONASS (Russia) Galileo (European Union) Compass/ Beidou (China) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation
- fossuser 14y agoThere are some bizarre comments in this thread. Does China have PR people that are paid to just comment on random news articles about them with praises in broken english?
- joshAg 14y agoAlmost certainly. Companies can afford to do exactly this on sites like reddit and amazon. The US military has admitted to having a program to do exactly this. Part of the reason is because posting comments on certain web pages is not a highly sophisticated task, so wages can be low for the commenters.
- ihsw 14y agoIt was: * in 2011 * contracted out to a corporation called Ntrepid, see more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid * worth $2.76M * targeted non-US websites to counter-act extremist propaganda That is hardly representative of the US military rather than pet project, let's stop the fear mongering.
- joshAg 14y agoHow is that at odds with what I said? While you provided more details than I did, it doesn't disagree that the US military has hired people to post comments on sites to further its PR goals. However, the project is probably didn't end in 2011 as you have implied, but is still ongoing since there has been no news that it has been shut down. Also, this is only what the US government has admitted, and only as a response to the information that was leaked as part of the HB Gary hacking. These types of programs are usually not publicized. It is entirely possible that the program is larger than reported or has grown since 2011, especially in light of the NSA whistle-blower's report about data collection of US citizens.
- ihsw 14y agoMuch of what you have said now is pure speculation. Furthermore the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) are known to engage in both foreign and domestic clandestine operations while it would be scandalous for the US Military to operate domestically, so I highly doubt they're operating domestically.