Sweden’s Swepos became the first foreign company to use Russia’s GLONASS positioning technology, due to Swepos’ conviction that it is better than GPS at northern latitudes, reported Reuters.
Swepos is Sweden’s national network of permanent satellite reference stations. Its purpose is to provide satellite data for a range of applications, from real-time positioning that is accurate to within meters, to studies of crust movements of the earth that are accurate to within millimeters.
GLONASS “functions somewhat better at northern latitudes because its satellite orbits are located higher in the sky and we see them better than we do the GPS satellites,” Bo Jonsson, deputy head of a geodesic research unit at Swepos, told Reuters.
Jonsson added that 90% of their clients were using GLONASS in combination with GPS.
“The Americans themselves will be forced to use it at northern latitudes,” Anatoly Perminov, Head of Russia’s Federal Space Agency, predicted last week in conversation with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to Reuters.
Strong domestic ambitions, first international steps
GLONASS promoters aim to develop GLONASS-supported services in a range of other regions, including India, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet republics.
In early March, agreements were signed with Zatix, a Brazilian tracking company, to push GLONASS-related technologies to Latin-American markets.
Meanwhile, leading international players such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, ST-Ericsson, and STMicroelectronics have already positioned themselves on the nascent market of GLONASS-supported receivers.
On the domestic market, GLONASS is expected to be used on a large scale as early as this year, thanks to a new law in Russia. As EWDN recently reported, the new law requires that all vehicles transporting passengers, large volumes, or dangerous materials use GLONASS-supported navigators beginning July 2011.
In February, several Russian regions decided to deploy a GLONASS-based real-time system that alerts emergency service providers to traffic accidents and helps the service providers respond to them.
On April 1, leading Russian mobile operator and retailer MTS released the world’s first smartphone equipped with a GLONASS+GPS-supported satellite location system.
Creating an effective system for commercializing GLONASS will take three or four years, according to Alexander Gurko, general manager of Navigation Information Systems (NIS), Russia’s provider of national navigation services. “In this time frame, we must create the conditions for market self development, allowing thousands and tens of thousands of different companies to develop [GLONASS-supported] applications,” specialized site ComNews.ru quoted him as saying.
