[GSM] Geolocating

[Marc-Olivier Barre]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Lucas Bonnet <lbonnet at bearstech.com> wrote:
>
>  Hello guys,
>
>   during one of my presentation of the Openmoko project, I mentionned
>  the ability to know which GSM cell the Neo is connected to. This allows
>  some approximate geolocating, provided you know the position of the GSM
>  cells. It could be useful in an urban environment, where GPS isn't very
>  helpful (walls, narrow streets, etc.).
Well the key concept here is "provided you know the position of the
GSM cells". Now, you might try to call you operators customer support
asking them "Hi, could you send me a copy of your hardware database
please ?", but I doubt you would get a positive answer, *if* they even
bother to answer...

>  Then another question arised: during a call, would it be possible to
>  know the GSM cell of the other phone? Is there a way to know this, even
>  if it requires Neos on both sides?
Possible on the provider side. If that's possible in between phones...
well, we're all screwed ;-)

>  I'm not a GSM expert, so I don't know how this works, does anyone here
>  have an answer? Would that be technically feasible for the Neo to
>  communicate its GSM CellId during a call, for instance for automatic
>  treatment on the other side?
While that might be possible to send, you would still need the info
from paragraph 1...
__________________
Marc-Olivier Barre,
MarcO'Chapeau.