Cell Phone locatin data

[NetworksMD]

I know that II-Digit information is available for use when someone calls into a call center with a cell phone, but has anyone had any success with receiving any data that would pertain to the location of a cell phone such as a tower BTN or region identifier?

I had spoken to one person that said his company, which was a service location company, could identify a cell phone users location by using the tower information.

This obviously would be useful if you have different call treatments depending where the caller is geographically instead of the ANI of the cell phone.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[donb01]

Location based services are becoming more common now and will soon be all the rage. What you are speaking of using the towers is referred to as Assisted GPS (AGPS) - I'm not an engineer, but a rough approximation of how it works is that it uses the transmission latency from 2 or more cell sites to approximate the distance it is from the site and uses that to home in on a location.

All cell phones as of February 1, 2007 (I think) are required to support and provide this information when 911 is called, but the level of implementation for other services varies with the carrier.

There is also True GPS - like on some BlackBerry and other models where the phone actually has a real GPS inside and as long as it can see the sky has your location available. There are apps out there you can use to, say, find the restaurants closest to your location, find nearby attractions, movie times, etc, and there are other apps that will allow an outside party (with proper access) to view your location on another phone or on the web. This is useful for services that let parents monitor their kids location, transportation companies monitor the location of their fleet, find the location of your phone if you lose it, etc. Again, the available services vary by the carrier.

A number of the services out there have Application Program Interfaces (API's) that allow someone to write software applications which, given proper security, can provide a variety of location based services.

Accutracker, instamapper, geocache navigator, and a variety of other applications are available to play with for this purpose.

 

[NetworksMD]

Thank you for the info. In my particular call center application I was just hoping to identify the area code the cell phone is actually in or the state at the very least.

 

[jerryreeve]

If you are using a toll free number you might be able to get the info off of the service provider since you are the one paying for the call. I do remember that unlisted numbers would show on the toll free bill for that reason.

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Hill?? What hill??
I didn't see any $%@#(*$ Hill!!
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JerryReeve
Communication Systems Int'l
com-sys.com