Employee Monitoring And Cell Phone Tracking – Determining Mobile Phone Location Does Not Always Involve GPS

The necessity to Track a cell-phone, or what is also called as trace mobile is actually well established for everything from public safety, child protection, elder care, workforce monitoring and even relationship monitoring.  Nowadays, GPS enabled mobile phones are actually normal equipment, yet GPS signals typically are not always obtainable.  In the event that satellite signals are not obtainable, or precision is less important than battery life, using Cell-ID is a useful alternative to GPS cell phone tracking.  The position of the smartphone can be computed by the cellular network cell id, which pinpoints the cell tower the phone is using.   By understanding the position of the tower, then you can know roughly the spot where the mobile phone  might be.  However, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a couple of hundred meters, in high density locations, to several miles in lower density areas. For this reason location CellID precision is less than than GPS accuracy. Even so tracking using CellID still offers a truly handy alternative.

Another way of Cell Phone Location Tracking is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS).  Cell Tower Triangulation makes use of signal analysis data to determine the time it takes signals traveling from your cellular phone to a minimum of three cell towers to judge location.

To comply with Federal Communications Commission rules, cell phone companies have to be able to deliver authorities with handset latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters.   Cell Tower Triangulation fails to always meet this condition.  By way of comparison, commercially accessible GPS systems can certainly realize precision down to 3-10m.  This hinges on several factors, as GPS signals tend to be particularly weak and are influenced  by numerous factors.   With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider utilizes triangulation algorithms to determine the location of the mobile phone, 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 strength and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation effort.   In remote areas position accuracy may be off as much as a mile.

In general it is a matter of what location tracking system is obtainable, 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 mobile phone settings including options of  having real time tracking when needed, or preferring to minimize battery use and data transmission.  Generally the program can determine the position with a GPS receiver and transmits the tracking information to a server through a cellular packet data connection. The data connection to the server is usually made via the internet.  How often GPS samples are taken and how often and by precisely what technique the information is sent to the server impact usefulness and likely costs.

 

 

 

 

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