China is finally done with the development of its own geo-positioning system. Named Beidou, the new GPS alternative promises to provide your location with accuracy of up to 10 meters, your speed without erring by more than 0.2 m/s and give you the exact time plus minus 0.02 millionth of a second.
To put things into perspective, the American GPS has a margin of error of 20 meters when finding your location.
And that’s just the civilian mode of the system. Just like GPS, Beidou will work even better for military personnel. There’re no exact numbers for the military accuracy, but you can bet they are closing in on perfection.
“But why do we need another positioning system?” we hear you asking. Well we don’t, but the Chinese military do as it would make them independent from the US-ran GPS. If needed, the US can switch GPS coverage off in certain areas, thus preventing other nations from finding the exact location of their troops, ships and whatnot.
And since Beidou will be compatible with GPS, the Russian Glonass and the European Gallileo, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to expect that it will lead to some kind of fragmentation and affect the regular GPS users. By the way, the iPhone 4S supports both the American GPS and the Russian Glonass, so in the future smartphones will perhaps support all the national geo-positioning services.
