Mobile Tracking – Finding Out Mobile Phone Position Doesn’t Always Involve GPS
Posted by: Matt in Laptop Insurance InfoThe desire to Track a cell-phone, or what is known as Trace Mobile is certainly well established for everything from public safety, kid protection, elder care, workforce monitoring and even relationship monitoring. These days, GPS enabled cellular phones are actually normal gear, however GPS signals are not always accessible. When satellite signals are not available, or accuracy is less important than life of the battery, making use of Cell-ID is a viable substitute to GPS cell phone tracking. The location of the handset might be determined by the cell network cell id, which pinpoints the cell tower the mobile phone is connected to. By knowing the position of this tower, you’ll be able to know roughly the spot where the handset is. Nonetheless, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a couple of hundred meters, in higher density locations, to a few miles in lower density zones. For this reason location CellID precision is lower than GPS accuracy. Even so monitoring using CellID still gives you a very viable substitute.
Another way of Cell Phone Location Tracking is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation uses signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals traveling from your cell phone to a minimum of 3 cell towers to judge location.
To help abide by Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cell phone companies have to be in a position to deliver authorities with cell phone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation isn’t going to always satisfy this requirement. For evaluation, commercially accessible GPS modules will be able to obtain accuracy down to 3-10m. This varies according to many factors, as GPS signals tend to be pretty weak and are disturbed by numerous environmental factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider utilizes triangulation algorithms to try to pinpoint the location of the handset, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is further impacted by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the interference impeding signal strength and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation effort. In rural areas position accuracy may be off as much as a mile.
In general it is a matter of what location tracking system is available, as well as the need for precision. Hybrid methods are emerging that use various techniques in tandem to provide best available location given available resources. It may be important to consider how GPS location software programs handle the data and controls smartphone settings including options of having real time monitoring when needed, or preferring to reduce battery use and data transmitting. Generally the program can determine the position with a GPS receiver and transmits the tracking data to a server through a cellular packet data connection. The data connection to the server is usually made using the internet. The frequency of GPS sampling and just how frequently and by exactly what technique the information is sent to the server affect effectiveness and likely costs.
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