{"id":12033,"date":"2007-12-01T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-01T12:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masabidev.wpengine.com\/news\/cell-ids-and-location-based-services\/"},"modified":"2014-11-25T15:23:03","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T15:23:03","slug":"cell-ids-and-location-based-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.masabi.com\/it\/news\/cell-ids-and-location-based-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Cell IDs and Location-Based Services"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"block-\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">It was very interesting to read about the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2007\/11\/29\/google_mobile_maps\/\">latest update to Google Maps<\/a>, one of the nicest J2ME apps around at the moment, which can now find your location without GPS.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>My instant reaction was \u2013 <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">\u201cFinally! But will the operators let them continue?\u201d<\/span><o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">Current operator location services work by triangulating signal strength from multiple base stations, which can often give good accuracy in urban areas densely packed with cells.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>They carry with them a cost \u2013 low in absolute terms but sadly quite high for a lot of possible use cases &#8211; and all sort of privacy controls, which whilst clearly necessary have been a bit of a barrier to widespread adoption of Location-Based Services.<o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">Back in I think it was 2002, Masabi had a working system to track handset location by cell IDs.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>Ben, being an engineer at heart, had strapped a modem unit to a Palm PDA and written an application to read out the current cell ID and plot it onto GIF maps downloaded live from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.streetmap.co.uk\/newmap.srf?x=529750&amp;y=179750&amp;z=1&amp;sv=529750,179750&amp;st=4&amp;ar=N&amp;mapp=newmap.srf&amp;searchp=newsearch.srf\">StreetMap.co.uk<\/a>.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>I distinctly remember being very impressed walking down Victoria Street towards Parliament Square in Westminster and seeing it track us across the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.streetmap.co.uk\/newmap.srf?x=529750&amp;y=179750&amp;z=1&amp;sv=529750,179750&amp;st=4&amp;ar=N&amp;mapp=newmap.srf&amp;searchp=newsearch.srf\">map on this very GIF<\/a> with surprising accuracy<\/span><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">.<o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">Consensus seems to be that Google are using a very similar system, with GPS users providing location data to map out operator\u2019s cell IDs (something I believe explicitly mentioned).<span style=\"\">  <\/span>This suggests that Google haven\u2019t purchased the location data from the operators.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>Why would that matter?<o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">So how did we build up our cell location database?<span style=\"\">  <\/span>And if it worked, why didn\u2019t we commercialise it?<span style=\"\">  <\/span>The two answers are connected \u2013 we were ramping<span style=\"\">  <\/span>up for a launch within certain industries which could have benefitted from a single network\/limited device range service.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>Unfortunately \u2013 or perhaps fortunately, with hindsight \u2013 just before a major demo, the operator we were using decided to remove the cell broadcast info that had been supplying the base station OS grid reference locations (note: <span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><\/span>the cell IDs themselves did not appear to change, as I had erroneously stated earlier).<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"><\/span><span style=\"\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> <\/span><\/span><o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">We considered some sort of effort to map cell IDs into a database, perhaps open source, but without widespread GPS ownership this was a huge task and there was no guarantee that the operators wouldn\u2019t choose to change the IDs at any time in the future and we were not interested in trying to make commercial promises where we had no control over key components.<span style=\"\">  <\/span>So we put it to rest.<o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\">Some JavaME devices can access the current cell ID, as can signed Symbian <span style=\"\"> <\/span>apps and Windows Mobile apps; Google\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/mobile\/bin\/answer.py?answer=81871&amp;topic=12595\">compatibility list<\/a> <\/span><span style=\"\" lang=\"EN-GB\"> suggests they are targeting only these devices, suggesting they are attempting something similar.<span style=\"\">   <\/span>I wish them luck! <o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was very interesting to read about the latest update to Google Maps, one of the nicest J2ME apps around at the moment, which can now find your location without GPS. My instant reaction was \u2013 \u201cFinally! But will the operators let them continue?\u201d Current operator location services work by triangulating signal strength from multiple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Cell IDs and Location-Based Services - Masabi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.masabi.com\/it\/news\/cell-ids-and-location-based-services\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"it_IT\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cell IDs and Location-Based Services - Masabi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It was very interesting to read about the latest update to Google Maps, one of the nicest J2ME apps around at the moment, which can now find your location without GPS. 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