Last Updated on 16/06/2019 by TDH Publishing (A)
Global Positioning System became fully operational in 1995, and since then, many countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan with many others have all started building their own regional or global systems.
As part of the analysis, researchers spoke to more than 200 experts in the use of GPS technology and carried a survey over a period from 1984 to 2017, and it found that GPS has generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits during this particular time period.
The researchers found that the largest benefit came in the telecommunications category at $685.9 billion. The second most valuable category was Telematics at $325 billion, and Location-based services on smartphones being third, valued at $215 billion.
According to the study, 90 percent of the technology’s financial impact has come since just 2010. The value of GPS technology to the US economy is notably growing.
In case of some adverse events leading to a widespread outage, the study estimates that the loss of GPS services would have an impact of $1 billion per day, which is a rough estimate according to the authors. And it is likely to grow more during the planting season of April and May when farmers are mostly dependent on the GPS service for gaining information about their fields.
If seriously any outage occurs, the impacts over the first two days would be minimal, but after that time, the wireless network would begin to degrade significantly. Landline phones would be largely unaffected.
“GPS came along at a time of significant evolution in the telecom sector and played a critical role in the digitization of telecom infrastructure and the advent of wireless technology,” states the study. “Wireless technology continues to evolve in ways that increase its reliance on highly precise timing, which in turn increases reliance on GPS. Multiple technological trends—from autonomous cars to the internet of things—will be stretching wireless technology to new limits in the coming years.”
