As many as 270,000 GPS+GLONASS road navigation devices were sold in Russia last year, an almost three-fold increase from 2010, said Alexander Gurko, General Manager of NIS GLONASS, the Russian national provider of satellite navigation services, in an exchange with news agency RIA Novosti earlier this week.
These figures could double in 2012, representing sales of approximately 7.5 billion rubles, or $250 million. By 2015, the size of the domestic market could reach 100 billion rubles, roughly $3 billion, with one third of the units coming from Russian device makers, NIS GLONASS experts predict.
The first mass market GLONASS+GPS car navigation devices appeared on the Russian market about one year ago, with supply rising and prices falling rapidly.
The Russian government has done much to stimulate the demand for GPS+GLONASS devices, requiring all vehicles transporting passengers, large volumes, or dangerous materials to use GLONASS-supported navigators.
Last year, NIS GLONASS inked agreements with Russian regional authorities to deploy a real time satelite based system for traffic alerts and to aid the response to traffic accidents. The system, named ERA-GLONASS, is designed to work with multifunctional satellite receivers produced in Russia as well as specially designed digital navigation maps integrated into the country’s unified digital mapping system.
The GLONASS project was launched 35 years ago as an alternative to the American GPS and other international satellite navigation systems. GLONASS completed its satellite constellation in late 2011, bringing the number of operational satellites up to 24 in order to offer continuous coverage anywhere in the world.
Compared to GPS-only solutions, the GPS+GLONASS combination can improve the performance of location-based services (LBS) in certain cases. While calculating device position requires at least three satellite signals, devices that use both GPS and GLONASS almost double the number of usable satellites in the sky compared to GPS alone. Therefore, positioning is more accurate, especially in dense “urban canyon” environments.
