There is hope in China that Beidou can become a global competitor for GPS, but the US option still has “absolute market share,” said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert who has worked with the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs and the National Development and Reform Development Commission.

Experts say that China’s push for new navigation networks is also driven by a desire to reduce its dependence on American GPS, especially in its armed forces.

There are several other advantages for countries that have their own GNSS network over prestige, according to Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Space Engineering Research Center (ACSER) at the University of New South Wales.

“To be honest with Beidou there is nothing unique about that,” said Dempster. “This is just the prestige that the Chinese want to say that they got it. This is the same as going to the moon, planting a flag for that purpose,” Dempster said.

GPS history

The United States and Russia first began construction on their own GNSS navigation arrangement at the height of the Cold War.

GPS was first proposed by the US Department of Defense in 1973, while Russia’s GLONASS system began six years later in 1979. Both were declared “fully operational” in 1995.

Most systems, such as GPS, work by using four satellites at a time to measure the distance a signal needs to reach a point on land – for example your smartphone – to calculate exactly where that point fell on the map.

The US, Russian and now Beidou systems in China are partly owned or operated by the military, Song said. The Galileo network is the only purely civilian GNSS system.

Experts say that the reach and effectiveness of the global GNSS network currently leaves little justification for additional arrays to be built.

Suelynn Choy, associate professor at the RMIT School of Science Cluster in Melbourne, said it would be useful to have an alternative if certain GNSS networks were offline offline, as did the Galileo network in July 2019.

“From a civilian point of view it’s good because we don’t rely too much on one system … it can cause the global economy a bit of a problem,” he said.

But another benefit is giving the operating country a military advantage over its competitors, said Dempster of ASCER. If opposing forces navigate using your GNSS network, you can turn off the signal.

Military advantage

Dempster said that while debate has raged globally in recent years about the risks of using China’s internet infrastructure, such as Huawei’s 5G provider, the same concerns do not apply to the GNSS system.

“It transmits a signal, you have a receiver and unless there are other channels, you don’t communicate back to the GPS system or the Beidou system,” he said.

But there is a risk when the military uses the enemy’s GNSS system, which can be distorted by the controlling government or shut down as needed.

“But the Beidou terminal now seems to be deployed to a greater extent throughout the PLA, while providing capabilities that were not previously available to the Chinese military,” McCauley said.

Now that the system is complete, the PLA and the Chinese government can rely on their own navigation array.

Dempster said this could important for Beijing, especially because tensions with the US are growing in various fields.

“It would make sense for them to have their own military system because there are conflicts in the South China Sea over these islands, GPS can be rejected for them and the US military can still use military signals,” he said.

“So they have satellite navigation and the Chinese don’t.”

“No matter which industry, minimal errors can result in broad divergences. Beidou can guarantee perfect accuracy,” Song said. “Navigation satellites are the best military-civilian product [cooperation]The value of their applications and market space is huge. “

– CNN Shanshan Wang contributed to this article.