ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Felipe De La Puente <fdelapuente@xxxxxxxxx>]

In my opinion, it's important to use an open database with clear policies.

Then, a different discussion is how to help this database get filled. I'm
not very convinced of the automatic data collection from mobile terminals
due to the following reasons:

1. To have a real impact it will require contributors to keep their GPS
active in order to correlate cell tower information with geographic
coordinates (unless the cell tower location can be queried by the mobile
device, which I don't think is the case - *confirmation needed*).

2. Keeping GPS on goes against the reason why we need the cell tower
information, which is to reduce the dependency on the GPS receiver (which
is power consuming).

2. A lot of contributions from different relative positions will be
required to get a fair estimation of a cell tower's location.

I believe a better impact will be achieved if the open database
representatives/contributors request access to cell tower location
information per-country or per-mobile_operator. Being an open database, it
will be a win-win relationship, because the data could be used for
optimization and planning.

Best Regards,
Felipe.

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 5:56 AM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I thought the HERE maps thing did that?
> It really isn't a good idea for the Ubuntu handsets to contribute to any
> such effort while location services is still so reluctant to allow the GPS
> chip to turn on and do it's job. Right now my phone thinks I am about half
> a mile away from where I am, I can request the location as much as I like
> by refreshing https://www.where-am-i.net/ and location services will fail
> to do *anything* about it unless I launch something like unav or go to
> google maps in the browser, something that *subscribes to updates*. If you
> don't launch a moving dot maps application and wait then it will only ever
> serve up the coordinates of where you happen to have been some point over
> the last few days and leaves the GPS turned off. This means that the
> geotagged information from the camera, location aware websites, lenses that
> show local stuff and so on, just don't work very well at all.
> There are bugs filed relating to these issues, and they have been looked
> at, just not fixed in OTA11.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/location-service/+bug/1551686
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/location-service/+bug/1551683
>
>
> Alan.
>
>
> On 08/06/16 20:52, Mattias wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Does someone know if there is already software that makes you get a
>> faster location fix using cell tower information? I noticed that a-gps
>> works quite well in the city area but not in the country side.  There are
>> already a few open source projects (for android) that do this, but I am
>> wondering if it is or there are plans to integrate this in ubuntu touch.
>> There are open source databases with an api like http://opencellid.org
>> and https://location.services.mozilla.com/. For android there is
>> UnifiedNlp and with a backend: https://github.com/n76/Local-GSM-Backend.
>> Would be great to have something like that for Ubuntu. But I am not sure
>> how difficult it is to integrate this with the location-service dbus. Love
>> to hear your opinions on this.
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Mattias
>>
>>
>>
>
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