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
GPS isn’t two-way communication with the phone or whatever device is connected. There is no “connection”. GPS satellite just broadcast a signal down to the earth and it’s up to the receiver to do the math to use that information to figure out where it is.
To make it not-free you’d have to mess with the signal and then sell the information needed to deal with the alterations. But since it’s still 1-way communication, if that secret were to leak out, there’s no way to track who has it. In fact, it was once lightly scrambled to keep the general public’s accuracy poor. But GPS is run by the US military and decided it was a good public service and released it.
Road navigation, however, is something else. A map of the roads, traffic conditions, etc is a service Google provides, among others. If you’re a business needing extensive map information like turning an address into GPS coordinates a few thousand times a day, google wants you to pay for their services. But if you’re just using your phone to navigate to a store you’ve never been to before, that’s free. But it’s part of the whole Google ecosystem so it’s worth it from their point of view if people use google products, see ads, etc.
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