A brief history of the BeiDou system in the past five years: overtaking on the curve and contributing 70% to the core output value of the industry

　　Data shows that in 2012, the total output value of China's satellite navigation and location services industry was only 81.2 billion yuan, and this figure reached 211.8 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of about 22.06% over 2015. Let's follow the security electronics editor to learn more about the relevant content.

    The continuous expansion of the Chinese market has provided a foundation and development space for the commercial application of China's Beidou system. However, as a latecomer, the Beidou system faces competition from GPS and others. However, the Beidou system's participation in the competition is not for the purpose of replacing GPS, but to adopt a "compatible" strategy and share the stock market with GPS to win new industrial fields with "high precision". Next, the "Beidou-3" satellite will be sent into space, and China's Beidou system will enter a new era of "global networking". Many industry insiders analyzed that the "Beidou-3" will continue and strengthen the Beidou system's competitive advantages such as high precision and wide coverage, and the Beidou system is expected to gain a broader market space.

　　The BeiDou system is a microcosm of my country's scientific and technological development, and a representative of my country's scientific and technological research and development to promote industrial innovation and cultivate new economic momentum. In this process, my country's investment in scientific and technological research and development has continued to increase, reaching 1.57 trillion yuan in 2016, an increase of 52.5% over 2012, and an average annual growth of 11.1%. my country's R&D investment intensity (the ratio of R&D expenditure to GDP) has continued to increase, reaching 2.02% in 2014, breaking through 2% for the first time; in 2016 it was 2.11%, an increase of 0.2 percentage points over 2012. At present, my country's R&D investment intensity has reached the level of moderately developed countries, ranking among the top developing countries. (Editor: Zhang Xing)

　　The "GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Club" is one of the most technologically advanced "clubs" in the world. The GNSS Club has only four official members in the world: the US GPS system, the Russian GLONASS system, the EU Galileo constellation project and the Chinese BeiDou system. In addition, there are two "observers" - the regional positioning systems being developed by India and Japan.

　　The GPS system is the oldest in the GNSS club. The system was first established in the United States in 1970 and provided services to the Chinese market about 20 years ago. As the demand for navigation and positioning has expanded, it has become a "necessity" for ordinary Chinese people to travel. In the minds of many Chinese consumers, "GPS" has become synonymous with navigation and positioning services.

　　China's BeiDou system officially entered the civilian market in 2012. In the short five years since then, the BeiDou system has accomplished the feat of "from 1 to 100". Statistics show that in 2012, the total output value of China's satellite navigation and location services industry was only 81.2 billion yuan, and this figure reached 211.8 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of about 22.06% over 2015. Among them, the BeiDou system's contribution rate to the core output value of the industry has reached 70%, which is remarkable.

　　During these five years, the "commercial history" of the Beidou system has always been permeated with two key words: one is "compatibility", which means being compatible with other GNSS signals to obtain better services and compete with the "first-mover" GPS for the existing market; the other is "high precision", which means using special features such as high precision and short message communication to enter industrial fields that were not previously covered by GPS.

　　In the second half of 2017, four "Beidou-3" satellites covering the entire world are scheduled to be sent into space, and China's Beidou system will enter a new era of "global networking". Many industry insiders analyzed that "Beidou-3" will continue and strengthen the competitive advantages of the Beidou system, such as high precision and wide coverage, and the Beidou system is expected to gain a broader market space.

　　The report of the 18th CPC National Congress called for "seizing the strategic commanding heights of scientific and technological development" and "breaking through major technical bottlenecks". The five-year history of the BeiDou system provides a reference sample for this purpose.

　　"Compatibility" business philosophy

　　The "hot" civilian market also shows the huge commercial space of GNSS. This is one of the reasons why the world's major economies are committed to developing GNSS. However, with the "first-mover advantage" of GPS, it is not easy for the "new version" of GNSS to "catch up".

　　China's Beidou system construction implements a "three-step" strategy: "Beidou-1", which started in 1992, is a test satellite; "Beidou-2", which was approved in 2004, provides regional navigation and positioning services, and had 14 satellites when it was completed at the end of 2012; and "Beidou-3", which covers the world, needs to complete the networking of about 30 satellites.

　　Interestingly, the "second step" and "third step" of the BeiDou system construction happened to usher in the "historical handover" in 2017. In January 2017, China awarded the "BeiDou-2 Satellite Project" the special prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, which seemed to have the flavor of "summary and evaluation"; in the fourth quarter of 2017, four "BeiDou-3" satellites were scheduled to be sent to the predetermined orbit, and the "third step" of the BeiDou system global networking was officially launched.

　　In the five years from 2012 to 2017, the Beidou system had the ability to "challenge" the GPS system in parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Theoretically, companies at that time had the conditions to produce a series of products such as Beidou chips, Beidou antennas and Beidou receiving terminals to completely replace GPS products. However, Beidou companies did not adopt a "life-and-death" competition method, but implemented a "you have me" compatibility strategy. This strategy is also encouraged by Chinese government departments.

　　Sun Jiadong, one of the founders of the BeiDou system and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that China has always had a problem with how to deal with GPS when developing the BeiDou industry. The general idea is "compatibility" rather than exclusion.

　　As people understand it in daily life, "compatible" means that the device can receive signals from at least two systems. Take the navigation module built into a smartphone as an example. In the past, it received GPS single-mode signals, but now "compatible" means receiving GPS/Beidou dual-mode or even GPS/Beidou/GLONASS triple-mode signals.

　　The direct benefit of compatibility is that you can get better services. The working principle of GNSS follows the basic theory of physics: three parameters are needed to determine a coordinate in three-dimensional space. Due to reasons such as signal transmission delay, there is an error between the clock of the navigation satellite and the clock of the receiving terminal, so a fourth parameter is needed to "calibrate" the error. In other words, the terminal needs signals from at least four satellites to locate. Compatibility allows the terminal to receive more satellite signals, and the more satellites there are, the smaller the error and the higher the positioning accuracy.

　　Relying on this compatibility strategy, Beidou services have gradually penetrated into areas that GPS once dominated, such as smartphones, over the past five years. According to statistics from the China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association, about 40% of the 510 million smartphones sold in China in 2016 were compatible with the Beidou system.

　　However, "compatibility" does not mean that the Beidou system is just an auxiliary that adds icing on the cake.

　　Cao Chong, chief scientist of the China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association, pointed out that with the advancement of satellite coverage in the Asia-Pacific region and industrial applications, the application of the Beidou system has made breakthroughs in at least five major areas: in addition to the smartphone terminals and automotive original equipment market in the existing market, there is also a high-precision innovative application market, an intelligent ubiquitous location service market and an international navigation market.

　　The continuous improvement of Beidou-2 over the past five years has provided a technical foundation for the development of incremental markets.

　　Xiang Wei, general manager of Hunan Beiyun Technology Co., Ltd., said that due to the advance of GPS services and the high technical difficulty, it is not realistic to compete directly with foreign companies in the chip field. The easier approach is to rely on Beidou services to expand industry applications.

　　Since 2014, new economy and new business have emerged one after another, and many companies have tried to promote the integration of Beidou technology with big data, Internet of Things, cloud computing and other technologies to explore new application scenarios. For example, shared bicycles have tried to install Beidou high-precision chips and set up "electronic fences" to solve the problem of random parking.

　　Cao Chong summarized this trend as "new time and space" services. "New" corresponds to the "new economy" and also represents the applied thinking of "Beidou + specific industries and specific scenarios."

　　Xing Jianping, a professor at the School of Information Technology and Engineering of Shandong University, believes that with the emergence of the new space-time, the cost of Beidou will decrease and the scale of the industry will increase. Therefore, enterprises should avoid using Beidou just for the sake of Beidou, and should deeply integrate Beidou into other industries.

　　This can also be considered another kind of "compatibility": Beidou equipment is not just a Beidou device that provides location information, but is integrated and compatible with other application devices.

　　The advantages of "compatibility" will be continued and deepened in the upcoming "Beidou-3".

　　Li Donghang, director of the consulting center of the China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association, said that compared with Beidou-2, the goal of Beidou-3 is to achieve global signal coverage. Its new signal system is a perfection of Beidou-2, and the signal quality and service performance will be even better.

　　Xing Jianping said that the original Beidou-2 only covered the Asia-Pacific region. Now, with the proposal of the "Belt and Road" initiative, the "Beidou-3" with global signal coverage is timely and will drive Beidou applications to a broader overseas market.

　　High-precision “array change”

　　The "compatibility" strategy cannot fully explain the success of the Beidou industry in the past five years. Looking back at the "Beidou business history", another keyword that the market is optimistic about is "high precision".

　　As mentioned above, GNSS itself has errors. One of the major tasks in the construction of the BeiDou system is to minimize the errors by launching more satellites and building more ground reference base stations. From the completion of BeiDou-2 to the upcoming global network, a significant change in the BeiDou system is the increasing accuracy.

　　A reporter from 21st Century Business Herald noted that when BeiDou-2 was built in 2012, the civilian positioning accuracy of the BeiDou system was about 10 meters, which was comparable to the performance of GPS, the "big brother" of the GNSS club. In 2016, with the launch of two backup satellites in orbit, the civilian positioning accuracy of the BeiDou system was reduced from less than 10 meters to less than 8 meters.

　　Xiang Wei said that the most prominent feature of Beidou in the past five years is its improved positioning accuracy, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, where it outperforms foreign navigation systems. The high positioning accuracy of the Beidou system is due to the fact that the number of satellites covering the Asia-Pacific region is greater than that of foreign satellite navigation systems, which can effectively solve the problem of signal obstruction, making the positioning accuracy reach the centimeter level.

　　The "White Paper on China's Beidou Satellite Navigation System" released in June 2016 shows that, first, the Beidou system's space segment uses a hybrid constellation consisting of three types of orbital satellites. Compared with other satellite navigation systems, it has more high-orbit satellites and strong anti-obstruction capabilities, especially in low-latitude areas; second, the Beidou system provides navigation signals at multiple frequencies, and can improve service accuracy through the combination of multi-frequency signals.

　　A reporter from 21st Century Business Herald found that at the beginning of its design, Beidou-3 aimed to match the design indicators of the third-generation GPS navigation satellites and the Galileo navigation system, which have not yet been launched, and its positioning accuracy has been greatly improved. Beidou-3 satellites can use intersatellite links to achieve mutual communication and data transmission, and can also measure distance between each other and automatically "maintain formation". After global networking, the positioning accuracy of the Beidou system will be optimized to within 2 meters or even 1 meter. With the help of ground base stations and reference stations, Beidou satellites can effectively achieve decimeter-level or even millimeter-level positioning accuracy. Today, there are more than 2,000 ground reference stations covering many cities across the country.

　　"High positioning accuracy means that there are more applications, such as driving tests or navigation in complex mountainous areas. Beidou's performance is better than that of foreign navigation systems." Xiang Wei said, "In addition to Beidou's multi-system compatibility, the reputation of the Beidou system among users is gradually improving. Users also specify the Beidou system when purchasing products. The recognition has greatly improved compared with 2012."

　　Zhang Lin, manager of Shenzhen Gas Group, can appreciate the subtlety of Beidou's high-precision service. Gas pipelines are like blood vessels of a city, and they cannot be distinguished unless they are accurate to the centimeter level. Zhang Lin told the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that in the past, when using GPS equipment for maintenance, the GPS signal was weak in the afternoon, and the received signal could not meet the required accuracy, so maintenance work could only be carried out in the morning, which to some extent caused congestion in signal transmission. After switching to Beidou terminal equipment, high precision can be "enjoyed" all day long.

　　The Beidou application of Shenzhen gas pipeline network is part of the national Beidou precision service network. So far, the national Beidou precision service network has entered more than 400 cities across the country and is widely used in urban gas, urban heating, power grid, water supply and drainage, intelligent transportation, and intelligent elderly care. The China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association estimates that the total market size of Beidou applications in the national gas pipeline network has reached 2 billion yuan. In addition to the gas industry, other similar municipal pipeline fields such as water, electricity, heat, and communications can also achieve similar Beidou high-precision applications, which will form a spatial location service "blue ocean" with a scale of more than 150 billion yuan.

　　The same example is shared bicycles. The realization of shared bicycle positioning and "electronic fence" depends on sub-meter high precision. According to the China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association, the current annual market scale of shared bicycles in my country exceeds 170 billion times. Calculated at a unit price of 1 yuan and a market penetration rate of 10%, the location service market scale formed by the shared bicycle market in the future will exceed 17 billion yuan, with broad prospects.

    The above is a brief introduction to the five-year history of the Beidou system in security electronics: overtaking on curves and contributing 70% to the core output value of the industry. If you want to know more relevant information, please pay more attention to eeworld. eeworld Electronic Engineering will provide you with more complete, detailed and updated information.