Future of location services on OM

[Nick]

sorry for the gmail glitch ! here is the end of my answer...

 > I like to have more data available. Can you give us some insight how 
big such
 > collections can grow. For example your current db size and the 
current number of
 > entries? I would like to have the option to have such a db on my SD 
card for
 > offline use and syncing when on wifi or similar.

 From the information I have collected, there must be 50000 towers in 
France (spread
on 550000 km2) and I evaluate from 4 to 8 cells per tower for one operator.

It means from 200 000 to 400 000 entries in a database for one country 
(as large as France)
for one operator (to have the full country in local SD database)

For these 400 000 entries, you need to store
mcc/mnc/lac/cid and two double for latitude and longitude
(and perhaps other attributes such as max radius...)

Probably you will not need the full country all the time on your SD 
card. We probably can design
a way to sync the local openmoko database with the openbmap database... 
On LAC basis for instance...

If you want to have a closer look at the current local database
(I extracted the local database from the website), please look at

http://realtimeblog.free.fr/latest/realtimeblog_23_12_2008.zip

It is the SQL script containing all the cells (before opencellid merge)
cell descriptions and the cell coordinates...

regards,
Nick