Root Access

Bob

12:02 AM

heh, apparently climate classes are a thing

bwDraco

@Bob It can, but efficiency is what matters.

Dog

@Bob It can?

Bob

@Dog The map tab

Dog

Hmm, crowdsourced I think

@Bob II got about 70/40 in fifty spots in the middle of nowhere >_>

To be fair rural transmitters are actually kinda cheating

I mean the operator has the same amount of licensed spectrum just about anywhere, so an area with the same bandwidth with zero users and zero interfering masts is always going to be fast

Bob

@Dog You sure? To me it looks like it's actually triangulating from my signal.

Dog

12:10 AM

@Bob That's impossible

Bob

Huh. Ok.

Dog

I mean what would it be triangulating from and to? You need a triangle... your device is one corner. It doesn't have any knowledge of the other two, other than from crowdsourced mast DBs

Bob

> LTE, UMTS and GSM Cell locations from Mozilla Location Service (MLS), along with location accuracy

@Dog I was thinking that it would as I moved around. Perhaps not then.

Dog

@Bob That would be too smart

Bob

> The LTE, UMTS and GSM cell locations we get from Mozilla Location Service (MLS) and show in the map as antennas, are not real tower locations, but roughly an indication of the cell locations (if no cell location is shown in the map, it means MLS has no data for your cell).

> ** If the app doesn't return cell locations, or if you want to contribute/update the cell locations, you may use Mozilla Stumbler app to update the MLS database in your area.

ok

Dog

12:12 AM

Crowdsourced triangulation would actually be the best way of crowdsourcing mast locations. But that's way beyond the smarts of most app developers

Huh Mozilla stumbler... never heard of it

Though yet another 3rd party mast database... meh.

Bob

@Dog Sounds like what Stumbler does :P play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.mozstumbler

Dog

There's like, ten different ones now... and none of them will ever come close to Google's for coverage or accuracy :-/

Which begs the question... what's the point?

Bob

Heh. Google cheats.

Also I'm not entirely sure they're happy to share.

See: the WP YouTube debacle.

Dog

IIRC the Google data used to be accessible via a public API

But still. Crowdsourced multisampled triangulation... would be the best way of doing things. And superbly accurate on LTE.

Bob

@Dog They've shut down a lot of public APIs in recent years. But I don't know about this particular one.

There used to be a search API.

Dog

12:17 AM

Since you need at least three points for triangulation (four if you want to locate a mystery vertice), collecting distances from multiple users will give you many samples of distance and location and collating them centrally gives you an excellent source of triangulation data

Bob

@Dog But a single person walking down the street could also collect four data points.

Fairly close together, maybe.

Dog

@Bob They'd have to walk quite a long way, and an infinite number of points won't help if they're just down one street

A hundred different users, in different locations, connected to the same eNB though, that's pretty much ideal

Bob

True, it'd be more efficient.

Dog

@Bob Remember the measurement precision is only down to 80m, and has an error of +/- 160m in typical urban environments

Bob

Ahhh. Ow.

Yea, you'd have to go a fair distance then...

Dog

12:20 AM

In practice it's usually less, still.

Bob

Or have multiple people around the place, as you say :P

Dog

It's like GPS, when they say your accuracy is +/- 50m, the actual error is usually considerably less

I'm not sure what phones if any report neighbour cell TA's though. I've always wanted to build a software defined radio multinetwork analyzer.

Bob

@Dog But would you be able to tell if it's less?

Dog

@Bob No, but with a large number of samples, it evens out..

I once had the idea of building these SDR boxes that can simultaneously analyze all the metrics on multiple networks and giving it out to taxi drivers.

Bob

ah

Dog

12:22 AM

You'd get a shit ton of data covering a shit tone of areas. Far more than any individual could conceivably sample on their own, or anything you could get from buses

(Yes, all our busses have 3G/4G modems now...)

The companies building those units pulled off quite a coup.

Bus companies want remote fleet monitoring, vehicle tracking, and Wifi access for users. Build a box that does all three with just one chip and charge them three times for it.

Bob

@Dog We don't get wifi on buses :P

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