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edraferi

Navigation satellites are inherently geo limited. Can the Chinese system be used outside the Chinese mainland?

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It depends on the orbit. AFAIK GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo have global coverage (my phone can see all of them in the US).

The Chinese system is BeiDou. If Wikipedia is to be believed, they will only achieve global coverage in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou

That is not my point. It can be Geo limited by the OS.

If !(in China) _disable_

Although even that will cause unnecessary headache for hardware and OS vendors and will/might still lead to new security issues and backdoors.

Problem is...you (the chip-maker) pay licenses to the satellite-owners, if your chip does not work outside china, no money. The Chinese 'GPS' is probably just for military or for the independence from other systems.

Yes, but hardware vendors need to decide if they put the chip in all devices and reduce manufacturing/design/testing costs, or put the chip on a Geo specific model and incur higher mfg/design/testing costs.

It's always a tradeoff and the cost of the chip in itself is not the sole decision driver.

These headaches presumably are from the dizziness induced by introducing location checks inside the location determining code.

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