back to article China shoves Beidou intro tractors, trucks and buses

The Chinese government has mandated the use of its new satellite navigation system Beidou (BDS) in several classes of vehicle across nine provinces, as the sat nav war between it and the United States' GPS heats up. The Ministry of Transport made the decree on Tuesday – covering Jiangsu, Anhui, Hebei, Shaanxi, Shandong, Hunan …

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  1. LarsG
    Meh

    I'm sure it will work both ways, so they can monitor movement of the population.

    1. Richard Boyce
      FAIL

      Do you also think that Chinese TVs are also used to monitor what the viewers are doing in their living rooms?

      Do you wear a foil hat to stop "them" reading your mind?

      1. LPF

        If you dont think that china will use it to monitor the movment of its population, they you really are very very stupid!

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        The initial version of Baidu did precisely that. It used a single sat in GSO combined with a base station, you broadcast your id and the basestation did the position calc and sent it back to you via the sat

        This saved on satelites, didn't need so many atomic clocks and meant the handsets were simpler - but did have the unfortunate side effect of requiring you to tell the government where you where all the time.

    2. JaitcH
      WTF?

      @LaraG

      Th 'free' country called the United Kingdom does a lot more transportation monitoring of it's citizens than China does.

      Since the pneumatic brain-dead Plebs/Plods that inhabit ACPO decided to monitor the country they have wired up over 10,000 plate reading cameras and scanned over 20-million plates. All sitting there in Hendon and available for some people to view.

      So before sounding off about the Chinese, go ask your MP who authorised these spy cameras.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Unhappy

        Re: @JaitcH

        "So before sounding off about the Chinese, go ask your MP who authorised these spy cameras"

        Why waste the price of stamp, when ten minutes Googling will establish that the scheme was backed from the very beginnning (2002) by Nu-Labour with Blunkett as Home Secretary overseeing the Home Office's patronage of Project Spectrum and the subsequent Project Laser, that were the building blocks of ACPO's current system. Following Blunkett we had a string of additional NuLab mediocrities (Charles Clark, John Reid, Jacqui "Expenses" Smith, Alan Johnson) who enthusiastically endorsed increased surveillance, and made the funding available. ID cards were the next step, and will undoubtedly be back on the agenda after the next election, along with further tweaks to give more power to the communications interception programme.

  2. mathew42

    How accurate?

    Wikipedia suggests accuracy could be as high as 0.5m but is currently 20m for civilians.

    Has anyone verified this?

  3. JaitcH
    WTF?

    "China shoves Beidou intro tractors, trucks and buses" - another unwarranted sensational headline

    In the West so many forms of transport are equipped with GPS, including trains. ATMs use GPS for timing, as do TV networks.

    There is little 'shoving' involved, at least no more than in other countries. Besides the GPS coverage is a little rough in parts of China and Tibet. Why not promote your own system?

    Why are Western countries so possessive about technology? Can't have nuclear, but some can, Can't have this technology but some can. North Korea can't use rockets but everyone else can. These people forget that China makes most of the hardware these days and they are pretty hot on software, too.

    We should acknowledge it was the generosity of the USA who gave us GPS and the wisdom of President Clinton who ordered the encryption removed. Just think how many companies, not withstanding what Romney claimed, have gained financially from this. In the UK, the USA and world-wide.

    I have been fortunate to have visited China many times, both during Chairman Mao's not so successful rule until today and the progress is absolutely staggering and makes the West look less than successful.

    We should welcome China's advances. A home designed and built system, launched with their own rockets - some things of which the UK is incapable of doing notwithstanding it's technological edge.

    And Cameron wants to leave the EU. Get your immigration applications in now.

    1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Besides the GPS coverage is a little rough in parts of China and Tibet

      What did they do, roof over the countryside?

      GJC

    2. Alfred

      Most of China is still pretty primitive

      Have you been out of the cities? Have you been to Western China? It does not make the West look less than successful.

  4. Jason Hindle

    Ummmm... What SatNav War?

    It all looks pretty civilised to me.

  5. S4qFBxkFFg
    Go

    Excellent - the more satellites up there that every electronic navigational device can use, the better.

    It also makes it easier to tell if a particular constellation is being fiddled with; as the positions wouldn't correspond (assuming the device, or app running on it, is smart enough not to average wildly divergent values).

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apple GPS

    I know Apple's GPS uses GLONASS as well as GPS, but I've heard nothing about it using China's solution, even for the iPhones sold into China.

    I'm sure a number of Android phones are using GLONASS as well, as the capability is built in the chipset Apple is using that other OEMs are using in their phones. I've never heard of any chipsets that use Beidou, but maybe I haven't been keeping up.

  7. david 12 Silver badge

    China’s plan has always been...

    Near the top of the article, it says that "to reduce its dependence on the USA's GPS system as it could conceivably be switched off during a time of conflict to give the States a strategic advantage.".

    Which may be true, but frankly, doesn't make a lot of sense.

    Lower down, we get a sensible explanation: "will benefit local device manufacturers, app developers, service providers and other interested industry players in the near term,"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: China’s plan has always been...@david 12

      You've got that the wrong way round. In most commercial applications it doesn't matter what system you use, simply that you have one and that it works. The value then comes from what you do with it. The marginal commercial benefits of a country designing and building their own satellite positioning infrastructure will be far outweighed by the cost and the resources used to do so. Economically it therefore makes sense to share the costs with other nations.

      But for military (or state) purposes, it does matter if somebody else that you don't trust has the "off" switch, because the lead time to build your own version is so long. The circumstances under which that switch might be used could be far fetched, but if you end up in that scenario you are ****ed. What you can infer from the competing systems is that (as we already believe) nobody trusts anybody else - Europe and India might just trust the US, but are building their own independent positioning systems largely for vanity reasons. However, the Americans, Russians, and Chinese trust neither each other, nor Europe or India, and therefore need to build their own.

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