Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Sept. 26 (Reuters)-the Indian government will step up efforts to promote its local satellite navigation system, the Indian Regional Satellite Navigation system (NavIC), and require mobile phone makers to support NavIC in new devices sold in the country from next year. In response, India said the move was intended to eliminate dependence on foreign satellite navigation, especially for "strategic sectors". India also wants to encourage sectors to use NavIC to promote industries related to local solutions.

India is pushing tech giants to build smartphones suitable for their local navigation systems within months, causing companies such as Samsung, Xiaomi and Apple to worry about rising prices and disruptions because the changes require hardware adjustments.

In line with the Prime Minister's policy of self-reliance, India has been expanding the use of its regional satellite navigation system, known as NavIC (Indian Constellation Navigation), for many years.

CTOnews.com learned that Indian authorities wanted to reduce their reliance on overseas projects and the widely used US Global Positioning system (GPS) and said NavIC provided more accurate home navigation and that its use would benefit the economic system.

China, the European Union, Japan and Russia all have their own international or regional navigation plans to rival the GPS of the United States. NavIC has been used very little in India since it began operation in 2018. For example, it is mandatory in a bus position tracker.

But Indian authorities and trade documents show that administration and regional officials need to expand their use and push smartphone giants to make hardware adjustments this year to help NavIC and GPS use new phones that will be rolled out in January 2023.

In private meetings in August and September, representatives of Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung Electronics and other companies disagreed again, citing concerns that adopting NavIC-compliant phones would increase analysis and manufacturing costs.

Indian regional companies say projects such as GPS in the United States and GLONASS in Russia are run by defense companies in their international region, which can disrupt civilian services. NavIC is entirely under the control of the Indian authorities, who hope to internationalize it like GPS in the future.

Xiaomi and Samsung together account for 38% of India's smartphone market, second only to China and the world's second largest. Apple's more expensive smartphones have a market share of about 3 per cent in India, according to Counterpoint.

Apple's website says it already supports five international and regional navigation networks in the current iPhone, as well as GPS, GLONASS and Beidou. India's directive may put pressure on it to add entirely new navigation instructions.

To buy NavIC-compliant chips, most smartphone makers rely on international giants such as Qualcomm and MediaTek.

Indian companies say that by mid-2021, only about 24% of mobile phone models in India will have NavIC capabilities.

During the September 2 conference, MediaTek said that the company's 5G mobile phone chipset will help achieve NavIC through "some cost increases" and additional hardware. MediaTek added that it expects about 80% of phones to support 5G within two years.

Qualcomm said in a statement that it had been working with Indian companies for years to allow NavIC to be used on its chips and could continue to take action.

Another lobbying push from smartphone gamers is to persuade Indian authorities to use NavIC on the PC frequency already used by GPS on so-called L1 satellite TV, rather than just on the L5 frequency used in New Delhi.

Smartphone executives are pushing NavIC to use global L1-band chips to curb costs. NavIC is likely to support only the L1 band before 2024-2025.

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