The tension between China and the U.S. is acknowledged by many in the world, especially from the trade sanctions. To reduce the reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS) run by the U.S. Air Force, China has developed its own navigation network and it is set to be completed by this month. The project is not a new one as the country has been working on it for almost twenty years.
Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) is the name of it and the last satellite is finally going to be launched into the orbits within the next few weeks. With the launch of the 35th satellite, the system from the country will be ahead compared to GPS that depends on 31 satellites. It is also said that the Beidou is able to pinpoint a device's location with an accuracy of 10cm in APAC, while the GPS still has a 30cm margin of error.
According to the Director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research Andrew Dempster, Beidou was able to learn from the GPS project and capitalize on technological advances that occurred in the interim by arriving late to the scene. He also stated that Beidou has some signals that have higher bandwidth, giving better accuracy and has fewer orbit planes for the satellites to make constellation maintenance easier.
Furthermore, Chinese state media has also reported that the services enabled by the Beidou network have been delivered to customers from around 120 countries until now. Thailand and Pakistan were one of the first foreign countries to utilise the service. By 2019, more than 70% of smartphones within China were reliant on the country's own navigation system. We wonder if our country will benefit from the system as well in the future.
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