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 government initially created it for strategic purposes: having an accurate and reliable location source was (and still is) extremely valuable for military purposes. At it’s core, it doesn’t sound too complex, it’s just a handful of satellites that know where they are and what time it is.
Since the infrastructure was in place and it’s capabilities didn’t remain a secret for too long, it was opened up for civilian use.
The company who created GPS is the US military. And they need and want it to navigate their fleets.
So the feature exists anyway and the military decided to provide a less accurate access to anyone.
As other people have said, the military created the satellites for GPS. As for how it’s possible for companies to run navigation services for free, it’s, like any free service, supported by selling your data. Apple, Google, or Waze now have access to your every move and that information is incredibly valuable to advertisers and marketers
*Technically* GPS isn’t free, it’s paid for by US taxpayers as part of the military infrastructure.
It became “free for the world” after an incident in which a passage airplane was shot down by Russia claiming it a spy mission violating airspace. As a result the US granted use of the GPS technology system to anyone who wants to use it for free.
There are other *non-GPS* GPS systems out there, GPS is just the most common and popular.
Plus it’s a great advantage to the US militarily to have everyone reliant on your navigation system in times of conflict.
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.
It may be easier to approach this from the other side. Instead of asking “How is GPS free?” consider, “Why can’t companies charge for GPS?”
That’s much simpler to answer: they don’t own it.
GPS is owned by the US Government. What civilians buy isn’t GPS itself, but essentially a tool that allows them to talk with US Government GPS satellites. Some of these tools are fancier than the rest, but ultimately the ability to talk with GPS satellites is the same. And since it doesn’t belong to a company, they can’t charge for it. They only charge for the device needed to talk with the satellites.
As for why GPS is available at all, that’s because one time it was confusing as to where one country’s sky ended and another country’s sky began. And because it was nighttime, an unfun country decided to be violent and very badly hurt a bunch of innocent people. So the US decided to share use of its GPS service with everyone, so such things would happen by accident far less often. (See [KAL 007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007) for further reading)
It is the government, more specifically the US military that runs it. There are alternatives run by the Russian government and Europe (?).
Originally it was solely for military use, however in 1983 a commercial plane flew into USSR airspace and was shot down, killing everyone. The military released the ability for people to use GPS, however they made it so that it was only accurate to a few hundred metres, enough that a plane knows roughly where it is.
However in May 2000, Bill Clinton signed an order to make it as accurate for civilians as for military. However you still cannot use it above 18km altitude and 500m/s speed so it can’t be used to make makeshift guided missiles.
the GPS system is essentially a broadcast system, the satellites always transmit their time and location and basically anyone can just listen to the signals
GPS was a military system built in the cold war and the signal was purposely scrambled so that only the us military could use it, but since the Soviets already made their own GPS, and at that point they decided that they might as well give access to it for civilian use, as again it’s just broadcasting, the satellites were already there and anyone can listen they just needed to disable the signal scrambling
The GPS system is run by the US military and President Ronald Reagan made it available for civilian use for free after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 flew into Soviet airspace due to a navigation error and was shot down.
Other global navigation systems are also run by governments, and where civilian use is allowed they are also given for free.
Your question was answered but your question isn’t accurate, not anymore. Reddit being world-wide and all.
[GNSS](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=what+is+gnss) is today’s term concatenating global sat nav.
My cellphone currently(as of this post) accesses: GPS and GLONASS
My cellphone can potentially access:
GPS(US)
GLONASS(Russia)
Galileo(EU)
QZSS(Japan)
BeiDou(China)
IRNSS/NavIC(India)
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