THIRD RAIL

Cell Tower Mapping: How Google did it

January 9th, 2008

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Here in the states it is still pretty hard to get GPS on your phone. Fortunately, Google recently released a new feature which takes the cell tower records phone companies are required to register if they are of a certain height and uses them to help locate your rough location when you use their mobile google maps application. Navizon also offers mobile software that does this.

But what about urban areas where they have tons of tiny towers on rooftops, these aren’t registered with the government. The phone companies are very protective of this data because they use it for E911 and have paid a lot to get it into place, rather than offer up their info and make it simple for 3rd parties to build off of this network information they horde it because they can charge their users for premium services.

Either Google had to do some major deal-making to get tower info in urban areas like New York City and San Francisco from providers or they had to drive every street in these areas and map the towers to the street… view… wait! StreetView

Google has already driven with cameras and gps units all around the country and are now driving in other countries… Why not also map the tower data?

This is something I’ve done in the past. It’s pretty easy for GSM phones and pretty tricky for CDMA.

Below is a never before seen video from a few years ago where a friend and I mapped manhattan. You can see the convex hull of each tower develop in real-time.