Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
sensing systems. Early adopters of positioning services are users, operators, and
manufacturers of transportation systems. This is such an important area that
several sections of the next chapter are devoted to intelligent transportation
systems (ITS) of today and of the future.
It is likely that ubiquitous positioning may be a future disruptive technology
and may have an impact on business and society that is far greater than may be
commonly supposed. When the mobile phone was brought to market in the 1980s,
nobody was forecasting that by 2003 there would be more mobile calls globally
than fixed calls and that the market for mobile voice calls would dominate with
now 2 billion handsets worldwide [1]. Perhaps a social “killerapp” for teenage
users might emerge based on location-aware gaming or social group organization.
This may develop in the same way as SMS texting, which was originally designed
to promote voice calls for business people but led to a new social phenomenon,
language, and culture, dominated by a youth market.
3.2
Commercial Frameworks
Is there any prospect for ubiquitous positioning to become a reality in the
foreseeable future? There appear to be three ways for the provision of widespread
Whereness services to become available.
First, it would be possible theoretically to build dedicated infrastructures to
offer commercial services. The cost, however, would be of the same order as the
provision of cellular radio (billions of euros or dollars per major network), and it
seems unlikely currently that any single commercial system is likely to emerge or
that the public would want or trust any government to do it. Second, although
some dedicated systems are available [2], these are currently aimed at niche users
and are likely to remain expensive options. The progress that has been made to
date has been publicly funded with the GPS systems and the other regional GNSS
funded by states. The third option is perhaps the most realistic scenario and draws
upon the first two. This concerns the integration (or convergence) of many
existing technologies and businesses to gradually extend positioning services with
useful quality of service into all required environments and markets. It will,
however, only become possible as the digital networked economy increases in its
scope and impact.
3.3
The Impact of Openness
Users would no doubt like to have highly accurate positioning and location-
dependent applications working everywhere and at all times, preferably for very
little personal investment or even better, for free. Some of the business models
associated with the Internet and computing take this approach and positioning
technology is currently no exception. Is GPS really free? Are the advertisements
