Summer 2006

If your company has dismissed the idea of tracking drivers or other employees by mobile phone or GSM SIM card because of cost and lack of pinpoint positioning, a company called Tri-sent is hoping to change your mind.

It is marketing a sophisticated cell-ID tracking system which combines 3G and GSM technology with an intelligent location server, based on patented Tri-cell technology.

"Cell ID" does not suffer the "urban canyon" problems of GPS systems in requiring a line of sight to the satellite, but accuracy is dependent on how close the mobile networks "cells" are to each other; in rural areas they can be 5 km apart. And users pay each time they "ping" the mobile device to get a cell ID and position fix.

Tri-locator overcomes this problem by using the same GPRS packet data system that GPS-enabled vehicles use to communicate their positions. The GSM modem in the phone takes various network measurements, collects them into a single data packet and sends it to the Trisent location server. Here, the data is combined with two other databases to calculate the phone's position.

 

One of these is a historic database from other phones that have been located on that cell in the past, and the other database contains knowledge about that particular cell site. The technology minimises the large errors that can otherwise occur with cell ID, the company says, improving the accuracy rate from between 250m and 5km to between 100m and 600 metres.

Currently Tri-locator is being used for services provided by FollowUs, Verilocation, Justfone and Future Data Systems.