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by fellerts 556 days ago
How are they able to achieve sub-100 meter accuracy? I might be missing something, but In my experience, collecting the cellular parameters is the easy part. The challenge is knowing where the cells actually are. You can ask Google's geolocation API, but that typically returns a fix with ~1000 meter accuracy if it returns a fix at all. These databases are curated based on GPS+cellular information from millions of phones. There is no global source of truth.

If only base stations included location information in their transmissions...
2 comments
timerol 556 days ago
FTA: Our localization approach combines open-source databases (OpenCellID [47], Mozilla Location Services [66], and CellMapper [12]) for PCI-to-coordinate mapping of cell towers with a trilateration technique based on relative signal strengths.
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gruez 556 days ago
That doesn't really answer the question. Those services basically work the same way as Google's geolocation API, but they're somehow able to magically get better accuracy.
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vlovich123 556 days ago
Google's cellular geolocation implementation is probably unmaintained & all their focus is on WiFi+GPS+Fusion via SLAM.
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evoke4908 554 days ago
Your assertion seems to be that Google's location service must be the best, and there's no way a trivial method can outperform it.

Have you considered that google might just perform poorly compared to other methods?

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ssl-3 556 days ago
Interesting.

CellMapper, at least, is not even a little bit open source. It doesn't even have an API.

This leads me to wonder what other details that FA provides which might have been fabricated from thin air.

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gbru-ty 556 days ago
If someone is focusing on extracting data for a small area, they can manually browse the CellMapper data. An API isn’t required for that—it’s a matter of accessing and analyzing what’s already available through the platform.
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ssl-3 555 days ago
Does that make it "open source"?
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emilamlom 555 days ago
Kinda, yeah. It's open source in the "intelligence" sense of the phrase because it's openly available information (like OSINT), but it's not freely usable.
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bigiain 555 days ago
Where I am (Australia) all the cellular base stations are licensed, and you can find the licence details including accurate lat/long online:

https://web.acma.gov.au/rrl/site_proximity.main_page

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