“We’ve set for ourselves the goal of holding negotiations with all chipset manufacturers to openly support GLONASS as soon as this year,” Russia’s Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications Nikolai Nikiforov told journalists at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress yesterday.
These chipset manufacturers have already set up the corresponding production lines, the news agency RIA Novosti reported the minister as saying, and the proportion of mobile devices that support the Russian satellite navigation system is poised to become predominant in the future.
Compared to GPS only features in mobile devices, the GPS+GLONASS combination can improve the performance of location-based services (LBS) in certain cases. While calibrating device position with GPS only applications requires at least three satellite signals, devices using both GPS and GLONASS benefit from almost double the number of usable satellites in the sky compared to GPS alone, making positioning more accurate, especially in dense ‘urban canyon’ environments.
In 2011, Samsung and Apple were among the first major international handset manufacturers to offer a mobile phone with a GLONASS+GPS supported satellite location system.
