Agreement will help improve services: experts
Cooperation between China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and the U.S.' Global Positioning System (GPS) could help improve navigation services for civilian users, Chinese experts said on Tuesday.
China and the U.S. signed a joint statement on November 29 to cooperate on the compatibility and interoperability of BDS and GPS navigation systems, according to a report by the Science and Technology Daily newspaper on Tuesday.
The joint statement indicates that the two systems are compatible in the framework of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) radio frequency interoperability, enabling civilian signal interoperability, and will continue to push forward for more cooperation, the report said.
The cooperation can take full advantage of all existing satellites and facilitate industrial development in various innovative areas, experts noted.
The cooperation between China and the U.S. will offer better and more convenient services for users, Lu Xiaochun, deputy director of the National Time Service Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was quoted as saying in the Science and Technology Daily report.
China's BDS has made great progress in expanding coverage but its full potential has yet to be unleashed, Cao Chong, chief expert with the GNSS and LBS Association of China (GLAC), told the Global Times on Tuesday.
BDS is working on standardization for compatibility and interoperability to ensure that the domestic market coverage will be complete by 2020, Cao said.
In 2020, with a user base of about 1.4 billion, BDS will serve the largest user base in the world, and its output value will be around 400 billion yuan ($60.55 billion), according to Cao's prediction.
"China's market is huge and industries are seeking to work on the right things at the right time and the right locations. BDS is breaking the monopoly situation that GPS created," Cao noted.
Lu said that China and the U.S. have already been cooperating on other aspects of BDS and GPS, including frequency resources.
China and the U.S. reached an agreement in December 2015 to allow BDS to share frequency resources without affecting the frequency band of GPS signals, Lu said.
China and Russia are also cooperating on the interoperability and compatibility of the BDS and Russia's Glonass satellite navigation systems, according to Lu.
