TABLE OF CONTENTS Len Jacobson
Global Systems and Marketing, Inc.
The only thing more difficult than describing the GNSS market is predicting its future growth. Until there is a deployed GALILEO satellite constellation late in this decade, the GNSS market will consist largely of the GPS market and its space-based and ground-based augmentations. Even more tenuous is the market potential for China s BeiDou and Russia s GLONASS, despite a formal agreement between the United States and Russia to foster cooperation in their respective national satellite navigation systems. BeiDou is just getting started as a test program, and GLONASS has largely been ignored by the world s civil user community in favor of GPS. Thus, these systems, along with the Japanese QZSS and the Indian GAGAN, are necessarily excluded from any marketing considerations due to the uncertainty of their schedules and viability. But if they are fielded, perhaps by the 2012 2015 time frame, they could influence the overall market potential of GNSS beyond just GPS and GALILEO.
Market definitions usually start by counting the sales of the goods and services loosely associated with a technology. But how does one aggregate and quantify an ensemble of goods such as GPS receivers that range from the $2 chips that are components of a GPS receiver for use inside cell phones to large $300,000, nuclear-hardened navigation sets inside a submarine? And how do you account for all the value-added applications enabled by GPS? Are they part of the GNSS market?
