Beidou launches navigation system for the Asia-Pacific region. A challenge to GPS

Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The satellite navigation system Beidou ("Big Dipper") has begun to release data for commercial use throughout the Asia-Pacific region, in strong competition with the U.S. system GPS (Global Positioning System).

Just a year ago the Beidou system offered data locally, tested on 100 thousand vehicles in nine provinces of China. Today it covers data from Afghanistan to the western Pacific and from Mongolia to the north of Australia. According to Ran Chengqi (see photo), a spokesman for the Chinese system, by 2015 Beidou will acquire 15-20% of the market now dominated by the GPS. The plan is to cover 70-80% of the internal market by 2020, to become then the most popular navigation system in the world.

At present Beidou offers exceptional features: it can identify the user within a 10 meters radius; its speed within 2 meters per second; synchronization time within 50 nanoseconds. But the competition with GPS clashes over the price, since the costs of Beidou are higher.

The central government has already spent billions on the system and plans to invest at least 40 billion yuan (4.8 billion euro) over the next 10 years. According to Baidou, by 2015, its market could easily reach 200 billion Yuan. In addition to economic reasons, China is pushing for an autonomous satellite system also for security. It is concerned that in the event of war it would be risky to depend on a foreign system that could be defused.

The Beidou system has a more advanced technology than that used by GPS, the GLONASS system in Russia and Galileo in Europe, but is compatible with all of them.