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
First off, GPS only gives you coordinates, proprietary software is how you turn coordinates into something that’s useful for the everyday person.
The GPS satellite constellation is a relatively simple system in concept. These satellites are in very specific orbits, and all they do is continuously broadcast the time and their ID number. Your device recieves that signal, and does a bit of clever math to figure out the coordinates.
The reason why this service is “free” is because GPS is a military technology that is maintained by the US government. It is widely used in the navigation systems of US military vehicles and in the guidance systems of smart bombs, cruise missiles, and other guided munitions. It’s paid for by US taxpayets, and is maintained by the US air force.
Because of the system’s design, it costs the same amount of money no matter how many people are using it. Other countries have put up their own GPS constellations as well. The EU has the Galileo constellation and russia has GLONASS. Most modern GPS recievers can use all of them though.
However, like i said, you need a bit more to turn coordinates into something that’s actually useful. For starters, you need maps. Maps are not nescessarily free. In the early days of GPS navigation, garmin did actually charge a subscription fee for access to maps and updates to those maps, as did most GPS providers. They also charged for GPS units with software that could perform turn by turn navigation for cars. This made GPS navigation cost prohibitive for most people, and it was considered a premium luxury feature.
This buisness model was upended with the introduction of smartphones. A key selling point of early smart phones was the built in GPS reciever that could be used by a variety of different apps on your phone, instead of being confined to a separate and fairly expensive device. Much like mp3 players, dumb phones, and digital cameras, standalone GPS units quickly became a thing of the past.
The final nail in the coffin was google maps, a service provided by google for free and funded by ad revenue and google’s existing buisness model. Google makes money off of maps in two different ways.
First, is through bidding out search priorities. For example if you search for “fast food near me” the order of the results that come up are influenced by how much those restruant chains are paying google. This is why mcdonald’s might come up as the top result, even if it’s not the closest one to you.
The second is through data collection. Navigation data is very useful for figuring out what the best routes are and what traffic might look like. This data is worth a lot of money to companies that transport things like amazon, UPS, or fedex. It’s also useful to traffic engineers in local towns & cities, and it can even tell buisnesses where the best place to set up shop is.
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