China
on 27 December 2013 welcomed the Asian countries to use its home grown BeiDou
Navigation System for navigation system for free.
China is intended
to widen the use of its home grown BeiDou Navigation System, which already has
16 satellites. China is keen to develop BeiDou satellite as an alternative to
the American Global Positioning System (GPS) and Russian
GLONASS.
GPS has been
active since the 1970s and has satellites in orbit. The satellites have been
operating for more than two decades. BeiDou launched the
first of its current generation satellites only five years ago.
GPS (Global Positioning System) comprises 30 satellites,
while BeiDou already has over sixteen and is going to have another forty in
orbit by the time the network is complete in 2020, at a cost of another 6
billion dollar.
The greater the number of satellites, the easier it is for the
system to calculate location, time and velocity of moving objects.
In
this scenario, China offers the use of its satellite for free to its neighbouring countries
on the lines of American GPS. The focus will be on countries in the
Asia-Pacific region, and particularly in South and Southeast Asia, where the
satellites has offered the
highest accuracy. China is developing Stations in Pakistan to improve the service
there.
By
January 2014, Thailand will become the first country in 2014 to build a
satellite station based on BeiDou, with both countries signing a 319 million
dollar deal. The successful deployment of BeiDou means the increasingly potent
Chinese armed forces will have an accurate, independent navigation system. It
has a vital technology for guiding the missiles, warships and attack aircraft
that allow Beijing to claim great power status.
The
system, which was first launched in 2011 for use only by the government and
military, has over the past year begun to be widely deployed for civilian uses
domestically. Currently, 80 per cent of passenger buses and trucks in China are
using the system. The Chinese State Council, or Cabinet, said in a September
report that the domestic satellite navigation industry would be valued at 400
billion Yuan i.e. 4 lakh crore rupees by 2020.
BeiDou is the only satellite navigation system that offers
telecommunication services. That means that, apart from giving users location
and time information, BeiDou can also send
users’ information to other people and communicate with users via text
messages. China launched the first satellite for the
BeiDou system in 2000 and a preliminary version of the system has been used in
traffic control, weather forecasting and disaster relief work on a trial basis,
since 2003. More than 1000 BeiDou terminals were used after the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake to provide information from the disaster area. The system was also
used during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 Shanghai Expo to
pinpoint traffic congestion and supervise venues.
The
global satellite navigation segment has become a crowded marketplace over the
past decade, and looks to become even more so. Russia recently completed its
constellation of Glonass satellites (though it has since lost one). Europe is
unrolling its Galileo system, while other countries such as India and Japan
plan to develop at least regional navigation networks.