Mobile phones are now a necessary part of running a business. Companies have come to rely on the mobility of these phones to efficiently run their operations or service customers. When this mobility is combined with the knowledge of their locations, the efficiency of using mobile phones is greatly enhanced. Today worldwide there are only a few mobile phone companies offering mobile phone tracking based only on the GSM network capability with accuracy better just cell tower coverage area. MappointAsia, has developed a service for tracking mobile phones to within one tenth the area of a cell site coverage, generally 100 meter accuracy in an urban area to 2 KM in rural areas. This is done without any overt action on the part of the mobile phone. Beginning in November 2004, this service is being offered in Thailand in conjunction with Advance Info Services (AIS), the largest mobile phone operator in Thailand . A brochure describing the service in Thai from AIS is attached.
How the technology works
MappointAsia has developed a system that uses information available to cell phone operators as a matter of course to determine location of any mobile phones within the GSM network. The system makes use of our very accurate map in combination with cell tower locations to calculate a position of the mobile phone. This is done without any action of the mobile phone user and does not send any information to the phone to know that it is being tracked. A location server is installed at the mobile phone operator's site connected to the internal server which, in turn, serves as the gateway and connects to the mobile phone locator server via the Internet. The diagram below shows how this works at AIS in Thailand .
Commercialization of the service requires that the person being tracked signs a consent form. The tracking PC is then loaded with the software and map. When in operation, the PC must be connected to the Internet. The request is then sent to the tracking server at MappointAsia which then passes the request to the server at the mobile operator. After the request is serviced, the data is sent back to the PC for display of the location.
The figures above shows the display of the tracking in Bangkok . One of the cell site is in a building with limited coverage and shows as a small circular area for the phone being tracked.
For information on how sign up for this service, please contact : Email : panadda@mappointasia.com
