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 time stamp from each GPS satellite is also used heavily by the banking system worldwide.
”Putting a little clock in the credit-card machines wouldn’t work, because over time, even the most precise clocks start to differ from one another. That doesn’t matter when you’re meeting me for lunch at noon, but if you’re timing transactions down to the microsecond standard now used in many electronic networks, tiny differences can screw up your whole operation.
What makes the Global Positioning System so crucial, then, isn’t in fact the “positioning” part; it’s the ability to make machines all over the planet agree on exactly what time it is.
Developed and launched by the US military in the 1980s, GPS became fully operational in 1993. Today it consists of 31 satellites. Each satellite contains an atomic clock, which is synced regularly with high-precision timing devices at the US Naval Observatory. Phones, ATMs and other devices can pick up the timing signals from three or four satellites, and use the knowledge of exactly when each signal was sent to triangulate their position on earth.
Besides providing the military with better way-finding, the ubiquitous timing signal became a public good used by numerous private industries.”
Further, mobile phone networks rely on GPS to super accurately time the parcels of data for each conversation. There’s a good read here…
https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-depends-on-gps-and-its-shockingly-vulnerable-to-attack
Imagine somebody built a bunch of clock towers all over the city, and then charge each person for looking at it. That’s a super dumbed down analogy.
Basically the US wants the control. It’s free because they provide it to the world, and they get to control it. Some other countries have their own competing GPS. Russias is called GLONASS.
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.
It’s not free. It is paid for by American taxpayers. It used to be usable only by the US military, but Bill Clinton made the decision to decrypt the signals so that anyone could use it after a high profile plane crash that it could have avoided.
On top of that, your phone just receives signals from the satellites, it doesn’t send any. Because the system is broadcasting an unencrypted signal which is just received by the device you’re using, there is no way to charge for it.
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.
You can thanks the USA military spendings for putting up the Satellites. Civilian usage is just a byproduct, as the satellites are just sending unencrypted information about their positions above the earth. From the position data you can calculate backwards where you are, based on what satellites you can see (not all satellites are always visible, similar to how the sun rises and sets above the horizon). There are multiples such systems from other countries and organisations such as the European Galileo system, or the Russian GLONASS.
GPS is hi-tech beacons, floating in space. Like real life beacons, if you can see them you can use them to navigate.
GPS wasn’t freely available to be used by civilians from the beginning. GPS is designed to be used with a set of less accurate codes for civilians to use in situations like surveying etc, and a more accurate codes for the military to use. The less accurate signal was further scrambled to achieve poorer performance, however this interference was removed around 2000.
Like real beacons, the biggest investment for GPS is the construction and delivery, after that the running cost is relatively reasonable. The people on the ground need to check if the clocks on those satellites are still accurate enough, and tweak them a bit if needed. Sometimes a satellite would fail and they would send the back up satellite to that spot and decommission the failed ones. And there’s new frequencies and signals so the missiles can be more accurate but usually that also means your phone can be more accurate too.
There are 4 GPS-like global navigation systems currently operational: the GPS, GLONASS, Beidou and Gallio. Your phone, if new enough, can receive all their signals. The first 3 are all defense projects. They are not free, some of your tax money is paying for it, and sometimes your enemy country’s tax payers money is helping you play Pokemon Go better. Just a thought.
Basically the same reason radio is free. If you’re playing music or displaying something in public you can’t really control who sees or hears it. If you painted a mural on the front of your house how would you go about charging people to who look at it?
The Satellites are your tax dollars hard at work.
The US Government funded the GPS Satellites.
Russia has the GLONASS network of Satellites.
And the EU has Galileo.
Often times Military use is what drives the system and Civilian use is an afterthought.
For years Civilian use of GPS was limited to less accurate positioning and only the US military had the more accurate signal access.
In 2000 under Clinton, the more accurate signal was opened for civilian use.
I watched this video a few weeks ago:
Scott Manley does a great job discussing GPS and how it works and some of the history.
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