I love your write-ups, very awesome. I have a question.
How can one know the Tower Broadcast Channel or Area Broadcast Channel of any Network Provider?
Thanks as you reply.

Babs

Aditya

Thanks for your reply. I have a couple of questions I would like to ask you offline. You have my e-mail. Please let me know how to contact you.

Thanks,

Sg

Thanks for the comment. The applications you are talking about typically work in 2 ways:

1) they have a back end service connection with the operator (these tend to be only operator approved apps – so they essentially have the full resources of the operator) and they can simply triangulate the address of the phone with a high degree of accuracy

2) they are preinstalled on the phone and are “always on” in the core OS of the phones system. This essentially means they are an “always on” program that has been either been post or pre installed on the device itself – essentially creating a program that distributes the phones location.

Depending on the platform you are creating your application on – you can create many applications now utilizing Google Mapping technology and using the phones native GPS and/or Googles (and other services) API ping back of the co-ordinates of the phone in lat/long. Many phone OS systems now (including the iPhone with its newly introduced Push Notification system in the 3.0 update) can distribute this information at any interval written into the apps code – although its usually a decision reversed for the user.

I would envisage – the apps you are talking about ‘GeoFence’ apps are using the later. Since the co-ordinates need to be in lat/long – since any associated pure triangulation system would be fairly useless on a non-operator level.

Feel free to ask any more questions and hopefully this has helped :)

Cheers,

T.

Quick question. Can a back end service “ask” a network provider for the location of a device? I see apps where you can put a GeoFence around your neighborhood to alert you when a child’s phone moves outside the perimeter.

I assume you can create a 3rd party application that will “periodically monitor” a devices location. Seems you would have to have a gateway to the mobile providers network and in reality their permission to ask for the location of the device.

Just wondering if this creates a monopoly on many LBS applications that can only be offered by the provider themselves.

Sg

Great article – never seen such an in-depth explanation about LBS before. Really excited to see where all this is headed. Thanks again for such a great post.

Brett

Thanks for reading.

Try #073887* or *#**364# – they are the only Motorola ones I can think of.

Cheers,

T.

A follow up to my last email. I didn’t include the model number; it is a motorola W385.

thanks,

darryl

I appreciate the information you provided and I need further instructions to access the engineering information screen for a Motorola phone. I tried finding this on the Internet, but could not get the unlock code information.

Thanks,

Darryl

This is an awesome post. Thanks so much for all the information. Really helped me understand everything in relation to LBS.

Not sure how regularly you post – but keep up the great work. You have a new reader.

Tony