Thursday, December 13, 2007

Is There Any Public Mobile Cell ID Database?


Cell spotting is a global cell id based information service that attempts to create a community driven database of cell ids. Cell spotting lets you install a small application on your phone through which you discover new cell sites. For a cell site the application can then fire up the phone browser to let you discover more about the site - the name, nearby places, latitude, longitude, information entered by other users and whether any of your buddies are nearby. Cell spotting identifies users by their phone IMEI number and lets you create a profile on their site. If the cell site is not registered, you get to register it at their web site to your credit.

Cell spotting does not provide the complete cell info database, but they have a search interface on their website. The search API is also not explicitly, though it is accessible (in the light version) as

http://www.cellspotting.com/thin/lookup.php?imei=123456789012345&mcc=404&mnc=45&lac=0fae&cell=12c1&pl=S60-3rd&ver=2

Replace the URL parameters appropriately and you would be able to search/add sites.

A good concept that has the potential to come up with an extensive cell site database, but as of now coverage is very poor and accuracy of information is questionable.

Cell track is another application that displays and collects locally information about cells you are connected to. It can collect information continuously and log into a file in the device that can be exported later.

Llama is an interesting application that lets you do actions based on cell id information and time. It lets you build your own cell id database on phone and group them into locations.

There are few other attempts at building a cell site database that I could find:

There is no comprehensive and reliable open database of cell sites available today. Building this requires large scale community participation. The Google database is not accessible for public use outside the Google Maps application.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey,

Interesting post; I am from a community of LBS startups and we are setting up a open Cell ID database. Check www.celldb.org - we hope we can find even more partners to collaborate on a large open cell id database.

regards,

Michiel Munneke
CellDB.org

Sissy4utouse said...

I Found a new site at www.Baeeo.com that currently runs on windows mobile phones and sends your cell info and maps it, Its free and they have a developer link which i assume would provide the same info.

Den said...

I have found one more - OpenCellID.org.

Cri said...

Ericsson Labs has one free with global coverage:

https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/mobile-location/documentation/cell-id-look-up-api

Cri said...

Check Ericsson Labs Mobile Location API https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/mobile-location/
3.9M cells in the db.

mobile prices in Pakistan said...

thanks for sharing the information with us for the public mobile data base .....

Rikard Windh said...

Here is another one: http://www.location-api.com. With over 11M cells.

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Gopi Aravind said...

Here's the latest API on the market with 52 million cells.. http://unwiredlabs.com

Disclosure: I work there.