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 only way to make GPS not free would be to encrypt it, this would cost more money, it is literally cheaper to just make it free.
Now then the American military did encrypt parts of gps some of the trailing decimals to make GPS measurements less accurate for non military use or for foreign military use since GPS satellites are in an elliptical orbit which means it is not geostationary and work all across the world.
But they have since removed that encryption.
Also since it was originally used for military purposes, you have to think about how it could be used in war, both by your enemies and by your allies. If GPS wasn’t free the only way to accomplish that would be to encrypt it, you would have to have some sort of handshake and some back and forth between the user and the GPS satellites for authentication having two way communications in war can be dangerous, basically if you communicate they can use 3 antennas to find where you are using triangulation. Also you would have to let your allies know exactly how it works and on the scale of countries an ally is just a future possible enemy. But if GPS were mostly just free and declassified you could limit parts of it for military use and gain much more like with mapping software for the general public.
In that regard it is much like the internet, the department of defense could have kept a lid on the internet forever, if they had it is likely what would replace it would be very different.
Latest Answers