The desire to Track a cell-phone, or what is referred to as Trace Mobile is proven for everything from public safety, child protection, elder care, workforce monitoring and even relationship monitoring. Nowadays, GPS enabled mobile phones are standardized equipment, but GPS signals ordinarily are not always available. When satellite signals are not obtainable, or accuracy and precision is less important than life of the battery, applying Cell-ID is a useful substitute to GPS smartphone tracking. The position of the handset can be estimated by the cellular network cell id, that recognizes the cell tower the mobile phone is connected to. By knowing the location of this tower, then you can know roughly the place that the handset will be. Nonetheless, a tower can cover a huge area, from a few hundred meters, in high density locations, to several miles in lower density zones. This is the reason location CellID precision is less than than GPS accuracy. Having said that location from CellID still supplies a truly viable alternative.
Another method of Track Cell Phone Location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals to travel from the phone to at least 3 cell towers to determine location.
In order to conform to Federal Communications Commission rules, cellular phone companies are required to be able to give authorities with device latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation doesn’t always satisfy this requirement. For comparison, commercially accessible GPS systems can achieve accuracy down to less than 10 meters. This is determined by several factors, as GPS signals tend to be quite weak and are affected by numerous variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider uses triangulation algorithms to try to pinpoint the position of the handset, its accuracy is proven to be less than than that of GPS. MLS is also impacted by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the barriers impeding signal quality and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation effort. In remote areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.
Generally speaking it is a matter of what location tracking system is readily available, along with the requirements for precision. Hybrid methods are emerging that use various techniques in tandem to provide best available location given available resources. It might be important to consider how GPS location software applications handle the data and controls cell phone settings including options of having realtime monitoring when needed, or preferring to minimize battery use and data transmission. Typically the application determines the location with a GPS receiver and sends the tracking information to a server through a cellular packet data connection. The data connection to the server is usually made over the internet. How often GPS samples are taken and just how often and by just what technique the data is sent to the server impact usefulness and oftentimes costs.
