Chief surveyors from Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong compared and contrasted their country’s regional positioning networks at Map Asia 2009 (18-20 August) in Singapore.
SIReNT in Singapore, the Hong Kong Satellite Positioning Station Network and MyRTKnet in Malaysia all consist of continuously operating reference station networks. All are owned by the local land authority.
The project is due for completion in 2013.
The networks vary considerably in size: MyRTKnet covers all of peninsular Malaysia, as well as Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo. SIReNT comprises just five stations covering the island. HKSPS covers both Hong Kong Island and the New Territories.
However, the biggest difference between them is how they charge for use. Hong Kong's network is completely free to end-users. This is because the aim of the enterprise is to get as many users as possible on the network, said Hong Kong's chief land surveyor, Simon Kwok.
At the other extreme, Malaysia has an initial registration fee, ongoing subscription fees of up to RM1500 per annum and additional fees to cover processing costs. The aim of the Malaysian operation is to recover the ongoing costs of the network, although not the cost of establishing it.
In Singapore, the position is similar: the aim is cost recovery. However this aim must be consistent with the largest possible number of people using the system, said Victor Khoo, the manager of survey services at Singapore Land Authority.
Asked to justify their positions, Kwok said the aim of providing the HKSPS for free was to maximise its social and economic benefits. Ahmad, speaking about the Malaysian network, said that in all jurisdictions the provision of services has to comply with directives from the Ministry of Finance. In Malaysia, the government would generally require payment for ongoing services, especially to commercial operators such as surveyors.
Khoo stressed that in Singpore, as in Malaysia, ongoing charges did not reflect the considerable cost of establishing the network, only its future operation.
The session chair, Chris Rizos from the University of NSW, asked the three surveyors whether competition would make a difference. Khoo said private interests would have a role to play in densifying the network for specific applications but ideally, the new stations would be interoperable with SIReNT and thereby add to the overall performance of the network.
Ahmad said he has not considered the possibility of competition. ‘I can't imagine that anyone would start a network in competition with us. There is no business case,' he said.
In Hong Kong, Kwok said competitive networks were unlikely and possibly even illegal. The really interesting case would be in border regions, where operators might have a choice of network. He said that then the important issue would be the datum. HKSPS runs on the HK80 datum, which is required for all legal positions in the region. Operators on the other side of the border would be required to use their own network, for the same reason.
However, he conceded that this would be an issue in cross-border surveying projects. He said the problem had to be managed on a project-by-project basis.
Source: www.asmmag.com
