Rental tracking via cell ID

If you need to find the particular location of the cell phone user (even if it is yours), you can use GPS. GPS stands for “global positioning system” and was originally developed for use by the United States Department of Defense. GPS uses a GPS receiver; The receiver calculates the user’s position by precisely timing the signals sent by GPS satellites orbiting the earth.

Increasingly, mobile phones include GPS as one of their functions. However, some older phones do not have this feature and it can be difficult to find users by location. One way around this is by using cell phone towers to find a particular cell phone user.

You can do this using a process called “triangulation.” It uses cell phone towers used by cell phones, GSM terminals, and GSM modems. In fact, iPhones use WiFi data and the triangulation method to locate iPhone users on Google Maps (along with GPS on newer 3G phones).

There are also business location services like FollowUs; with these, you pay to locate phones that don’t already have GPS included. If you’re a developer, you can also use commercial services like Skyhook and Navizon.

In addition to using commercial services, you can also collect mobile IDs yourself with GSM- or GPS-compatible equipment. You would store this data in a database and then use it to find out where mobile phone users are by first retrieving the list of cell ids that are nearby, then finding these in your own database and resolving to a latitude/ The length that was recorded when the cell ID was first added to the database from a device that had GPS available.

There are several open source resources with cell ID location data available. Some of these are: CellSpotting; OpenCellID, 8 moves; ZoneTag Cell Location API, Yahoo.

OpenCellID can be especially useful as it is an open source database of cell IDs where you can build your own application to collect information about particular cell locations (as in the database described above). Since every cell phone user has a unique number for their own GSM cell phone, this can help you find the exact carrier. If you know the number and the cell, AND you know the position of the cell (using triangulation), you can find the user. It’s not entirely accurate, as a given cell can cover anywhere from several hundred to several thousand meters, but it’s a pretty specific locator nonetheless. It can at least help you narrow down someone’s location if you need to find them.

Again, as older phones are retired and new ones come into use, most of these will have global positioning system capability included. This will make the aforementioned methods and applications less necessary, if not obsolete. However, that can take a few years and it’s also quite possible that more “frugal” cell phone users will use their old phones until they simply can’t work anymore. So until everyone is on a GPS-enabled cell phone, it’s helpful to know that there are ways to find users as you need, even if it means you have to use a little old-fashioned effort.