GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
In: Technology
The military created, pays for it and maintains it.
Like much of the public infrastructure technology initially developed for military applications, it has massive value to the public and economy, making access free.
The public good and economic activity enabled by GPS is overwhelmingly worth the cost of maintaining the network for free use.
Since the signals are one-way from the satellite down, adding more users incurs no extra cost, so the military can give commercial use access for free.
The US military reserves the right to disable GPS and limit the accuracy of consumer devices locally. Because of this, other Global Navigation Satellite systems are available from the EU, Russia, and China. Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou, respectively.
Latest Answers