Why Have Vehicle Tracking Systems Prices Dropped?

Costs of GPS vehicle tracking systems continue to drop which is good news for business owners worldwide who are beginning to realise how profitable it is to make their fleets more effective and productive, business owners are also seeing a return on their investment in a short period of time. For an in-depth explanation, read this article "Benefits of Vehicle Tracking".

To understand the reason why vehicle tracking continues to drop year-by-year, we need to understand how it works; Vehicle tracking uses a combination of GPS (Global Positioning System) technology, Internet, digital mapping, tracking software and mobile phone network. With all these technologies combined, it is possible to keep track of: vehicle locations, distances covered, speed, what time the engine was turned ON/OFF and more.

The US government has numerous GPS satellites orbiting the Earth, which they allow GPS and vehicle tracking companies to use, these are transmitting information back to Earth which can be picked up by a GPS receiver, a GPS receiver uses information from at least three satellites to calculate the vehicle position on the Earth with a 5-20 feet error margin.

After calculating the vehicle's position in latitude and longitude this info is stored in the vehicle's receiver which is also recording all the other factors mentioned above, every few minutes this receiver sends the information back to a given location using mobile phone network. This information is then accessed by a computer via the internet and decoded on a digital map of the area, allowing the user to track a vehicle with street level accuracy.

Before the mobile phone network was well established, the only way to get real-time information back to the remote server was to send it via the satellites, which was the equivalent to a tracking system and satellite phone in each vehicle which made the technology very expensive.

Now, with mobile phone towers spread out worldwide, it is far more cost effective to get the information from the vehicle to a computer, which is why there has been a large price drop in recent years and a corresponding surge in demand of vehicle tracking systems.