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?
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You’re talking about two things. GPS refers to the system that allows you to work out your position based on satellite positions. The satellites are just clocks with radios attached, broadcasting an ID number and the time. Things that use GPS are simply radios that listen for the time and ID and use it to work out the radio’s position — You can have inifinite GPS receivers since there’s no going back and forth, and there’s no additional cost in supporting more. Today, you can buy GPS radio-on-a-chip for pennies. GPS, and it’s cousins (GPS was developed by the US government, there’s also EU, Russian, and Chinese systems) were put in place by governments that launched the satellites into orbit, and while that’s expensive, it’s justified as a boost for the military and for the economy (think the transportation industry). Once in space, there’s very little maintenance required to keep the system going.
The other thing you are thinking of are map and navigation services. GPS tells your radio where it is, but you want to see that on a map, or have a computer work out how to get from there to somewhere else, right? Some services do charge money for subscription, some are funded with advertising dollars, some just sell media with maps on them and you need to purchase new media to get updated maps (my Toyota’s GPS navigation). In the case of things like phones, the software often transmits the phone’s location, and that location data can be used to select ads to show the user, determine when a particular place is busy, get traffic pattern data that can be sold, etc.
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