Tracing Mobile Phones - Anyone here work in telecomms?

DampCat

DampCat

DampCat

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Can telecomms companies really trace the location of a mobile?

I know they do it on films and TV series etc but can they do it with a phone that doesnt have built in GPS? And even if it did, surely they'd have to have some kind of link to the GPS satellites that recognise the handset they're talking to?

Anyways, I'd wondered if the telecomms company could trace the location of the nearest Cellular Transmission mast thing (no idea what theyre called) that is carrying the call... but can they really pinpoint an exact location?

No reason for this, sorry... just curious :)
 
They can use the phone masts to locate a phone to a general area, I don't know how exact it is though. Must be quite advanced though since it's been used as evidence in court before.
 
qqg3 said:
I thought they could use triangulation to get a rough location...
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You can do it with google maps, even if you don't have GPS on your phone.

So don't imagine it would be too hard for phone companies to do it if they needed to.
 
But Google Maps on your phone is a fairly recent thing.. and tracing phones has been around in movies etc since.. well.. since phones. Was it usually by triangulation?
 
As far as I know its always been done with triangulation from your nearest base stations.

I would guess it is accurate to within a few meters. Im fairly sure the first iPhone (did it have GPS?) used triangulation to do this but as said phones without a GPS chip can do this.

Obviously tracing a landline is a different matter.
 
As below. Surprisingly enough low level is good enough for 50 meters and you can find lots of online tools to do this. The authorities have the ability to pin it down to inches though :eek:

The technology of locating is based on several possible methods:

Cell identification – uses the concept that a mobile phone always communicates wirelessly with one of the closest base stations, so if you know which base station the phone communicates with, you know that the phone is close to the respective base station.
Time of arrival (TOA) – uses either absolute TOA of the signal from the mobile phone, or observed time difference (OTD) in TOA between two or more base stations.
Observed time difference (OTD) made by the handset. Handset cooperation is then necessary to transmit the position to the network provider. Location is pinpointed by multilateration. Also called Enhanced OTD (E-OTD), this methods provides certain advantages over the OTDs made by the base stations.
Angle of arrival (AOA) – AOA mechanism locates the mobile phone at the point where the lines along the angles from each base station intersect.
Hybrid – using a combination of different methods to enhance precision.
Under optimal conditions, advanced systems (such as OTDs, E-OTDs and hybrids) can in theory pinpoint the transmitter with the precision of several inches in the horizontal plane, much more precise than even military GPS, not mention watered-down civilian version of GPS. Under real conditions, various factors decrease this precision, especially in the complicated landscapes of urban canyons[2]. Many modern cellphones also have integrated compass and can sense the handset orientation. Further enhancement of the positional information would be possible using Bluetooth network of the nearby devices.

Typically, publicly available location services are, such as one based on Symbian[3], Windows Mobile[4] , iPhone / iPhone OS, or Android, provide watered-down information with precision around 50 meters.
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DampCat said:
But Google Maps on your phone is a fairly recent thing.. and tracing phones has been around in movies etc since.. well.. since phones. Was it usually by triangulation?
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google maps does use the technology that the security services have been using for years.

Its just taken that long for it not to be top secret stuff and available for use by the general public.

Its possibly also to do with the number of phones around now that can render google. 5 / 10 years ago phones didnt have proper browsers and couldnt have hoped to have used google maps on thier phone, even though triangulation was available.
 
There are several services about that will give you your current location in a text message, in general these are fairly accurate but it all depends on the number of base stations in the area, so if you are out in the sticks you are not going to get a great location, if you are in a city, expect within a few metres.
 
Recently completed a fraud project within one of the large mobile telecomms companies. They can easily track and often do track locations of phones.

Some of the stuff they do to counter fraud is quite mindblowing to be honest.
 
I can track all our blackberry users via our BES server, accurate to about 25-50metres, I haven't told our management we can do it but I love speaking to people I know are blagging a lie in/day off and smiling knowingly that they are lying to me :p

best one was a guy was in vegas and he was supposed to be in docklands!! :D
 
There's a few sites that sell this service as a way of keeping watch of your kids. You have to sign up and receive and reply to a confirmation text from the phone you want to track.
 
mame said:
There's a few sites that sell this service as a way of keeping watch of your kids. You have to sign up and receive and reply to a confirmation text from the phone you want to track.
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I've got an app on my HTC Desire which connects to Google Talk and you can send remote commands to the phone, one of them is 'where' and you get a Google map link sent back to you of both the GPS and the GSM location. Pretty useful really.
 
I work for a company that makes this kind of software to sell into networks, and yes we can track locations just using cell triangulation, and yes it is extremely accurate :)
 
I can track mine, and my wife's iPhone, to the nearest 50m.

Can also remote lock, wipe or send a message to the handset if it's stolen.
 
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