Qualcomm touted a shipment of 300 million GPS chipsets worldwide today. Sources suggest adding another 250 million to that tally by aggregating other competitive GPS silicon providers to the mix for total global chipset shipments. So, that’s approximately 550 million GPS chipsets deployed in various consumer electronic devices currently in active circulation. 

The below LBS History and Milestone chart [a piece I crafted for the IFTF] calls out an industry milestone of 250 million GPS chipsets shipped in October 2006, denoted by the orange arrow. In less than one year, we’ve doubled that count. To put it another way, recent GPS chipset penetration and gross adds in the last year equalled the same gross add growth over the course of the previous 6 years! Did we recently and silently totter over a tipping point?