Does getting a Cell id of mobile device will work

Question

If I get the cell id
Will it work to get the exact location of the mobile devices through j2me programming?

I got to know how to get cell id by this link:
Can I fetch position of mobile device in j2me having no GPS service using information from cell tower

But whether to get location accurate is still a question?

Answer 1

One Single cell is not enough to get you the accurate location. you need at least 3 different cell to get a location as accurate as GPS

What the cell information can do for you is give you a good information of the area and measurements

See API Information http://www.opencellid.org/api

How To

1. Get a cell ID and save the distance
2. When the user cell changes .. get the distance using same API
3. As soon as you are able to get an additional cell information start triangulation

Triangulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation

1. Calculate distance between P1 and P2.
2. Calculate the distance between P1 and the center point of the new n-sphere
3. Calculate the ratio new n-sphere/d. (Used to find per-dimension distances between P1 and the centerpoint of the new n-sphere.
4. Calculate square of radius
5. Calculate center point of new n-sphere
6. Calculate distance between P1 and P2 on this dimension
7. Calculate distance between P1 and the center point of the new n-sphere on this dimension
8. Calculate the coordinate of the center point of the new n-sphere on this dimension.

Have only implemented the calculation on client side PHP not j2me ...

Thanks :)

Answer 2

In short, no. To get an accurate location you need a mobile device with built-in GPS.

The Cell ID is a number identifying the cellphone tower that the mobile device is connected to. Therefore at best you can get the position of the cellphone tower, and use that as an estimate of the user position.

Also note that API's such as http://www.opencellid.org/api only give an estimate of the cell tower position based on data from other users, so it might not even be an accurate position for the cell tower.

In my experience this will work reasonably well in densely populated cities - you can get an accuracy of about 200-500m (still not close to what you'd get with a GPS). However, in more rural areas the accuracy could be as low as 10 or 20 km.

As pointed out by Baba, triangulation can give you a more accurate position. However, for this you need the distances to at least 3 towers, while in J2ME you can only get the ID of the closest tower (not even the distance). Some network operators do triangulation themselves, as they have all the data available to them. However, you'll have to talk to the specific network operators if you want access to this data.