BEIJING, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- China's indigenous BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) on Thursday began providing services to users in the Asian-Pacific region, according to a spokesman of the system.

The services include positioning, navigation, timing and short messages for China and surrounding areas, said spokesman Ran Chengqi, also director of the China Satellite Navigation Office.

Ran further specified that the open service will be provided with positioning accuracy of 10 meters, velocity accuracy of 0.2 meters per second and one-way timing accuracy of 50 nanoseconds.