Mobile Phone Tracking
Big Brother is watching your mobile! You've seen it in the movies and on American television shows. The police put a trace on a mobile number and in minutes they have the suspect's exact position displayed on a hi-tech phone map. It all sounds like Hollywood fiction or a secret service spying fantasy, but you may be surprised to learn that not only does such technology exist, it is also now available for anyone to use in mainland Great Britain! Mobile phone tracking was quietly launched in mainland Great Britain during 2003. Currently it only works on T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and O2 networks and that includes Pay As You Go phones, but other networks such as 3 and Virgin are likely to follow. Surprisingly no extra hardware is required and it will work on any handset - even older models - providing you have the permission of the person you want to track. You don't even have to use the internet, although many tracking services require you to register and view the location maps online. The technology behind this new tracking service is surprisingly simple. All mobile phones work by being constantly in touch with the nearest phone mast to maintain good reception. You can sometimes even hear these signals as funny chirruping/clicking sounds if you place a mobile phone close to a loudspeaker or radio. What mobile tracking does is measure the distance the signal travels from the phone to the phone mast. A bit like counting how long it takes to hear a clap of thunder, after a flash of lighting, to calculate how far away a storm is, only in this case it's a lot more sophisticated as it uses more than one mast to triangulate the position. The one drawback is the phone has to be switched on, so it won't work on a lost mobile after the battery has run down! GSM mobile phone tracking is cheaper, but less accurate than GPS satellite tracking which has been used for many years by the road haulage industry and in car Sat Navigators. Unlike GPS, GSM won't show you what street the mobile is on. What it will do though is show you a radius of where it is likely to be. The accuracy will vary on a number of factors, such as the landscape (i.e. is it flat or hilly), how many phone masts are nearby (towns are much better than the countryside in this respect for network coverage) and even the weather will affect the results slightly, but the best accuracy is usually up to 50 to 100 metres. Obviously this is enough to find a person or stolen vehicle, but not always a lost phone. Setting up mobile phone tracking is easy and normally only takes a few minute to complete. Registration methods vary depending on which company you choose, but they all share similar guidelines. These codes of conduct have been laid down by the phone network operators to prevent misuse, such as by paedophiles. The first is that you must provide your full name and address and a valid form of online payment (either a credit or debit card) which must match the address of the person making the application. You also need the permission of the person you intend to track! This is usually taken care of for you by the service provider automatically sending an SMS text message to the mobile number. This normally includes a password, or short code, which you'll need to be able to activate the phone. Once you have done that you can start tracking! Most service providers allow you to view the maps as a web page and some services such as www.traceamobile.co.uk also allow you to see it as a text message on your mobile. Sales of mobile phone tracking have been brisk, according to Trace A Mobile's Managing Director Jonathan Cook. "Since launching in October 2003, we have signed up 1,000's of customers who are both family and business users. We have also covered major sporting events, like the London Marathon and the Great North Run for the BBC, who wanted to track the location of celebrity fun runners, such as Nell McAndrew and Ranulph Fiennes, who were carrying mobiles. All of this has generated a lot of media interest and publicity." Business users have also been quick to spot the advantages of mobile phone tracking to find people on the move. Obvious business benefits include being able to track the location of deliveries, eg van drivers, or monitor sales reps or staff on call outs. It is even being used to retrieve stolen assets where a "tracked" phone has been placed somewhere out of sight inside a vehicle acting as a passive "phone finder" unit. One of the leading mobile phone tracking companies catering for this growing B2B market is www.locatemobiles.co.uk, although they are keen to stress - just like the domestic versions of the service - that employees have to give their consent to being tracked. It would seem though that employees are happy to be tracked, as long as they are kept informed and made aware of the potential safety benefits it offers them, eg should they get into difficulties in a medical emergency, or if they find their life is in danger and they are unable to call for help. So how much will mobile phone tracking cost you or your business? Probably less than you think. There are a number of different pricing models. Some are subscription based and include free location tracks. Others are Pay As You Go, but these require the purchase of a minimum number of tracking searches and can often work out more expensive for low usage users. Nevertheless prices are competitive and are broadly similar for private and commercial users. For example, Trace A Mobile offers 10 free searches a month for a subscription of 5 pound a month. This covers up to 5 mobile phones and is aimed at families and children. Locate Mobiles offers a yearly package at 50 pounds, which saves £10, but only includes 10 free search mobile credits, however this covers up to 10 phones so is ideal for small to medium sized business and also includes a mobile tracking scheduler and location reports, which can be emailed or viewed online. The cost of each location search varies from company to company, but is in the range of 20-50p, depending on the volume purchased. Although consent was given by the UK's major mobile phone networks to run this service in mainland Great Britain, this has not been the case for the whole of Europe or the rest of the world for that matter. Currently in Europe only Germany, Netherlands and Norway has a similar service, with the US still lagging behind in GSM tracking technology. Mobile phone number tracking technology may be new, but it looks set to be around for a long time. With improvements in how the phones are tracked, using a new system called Timing Advanced software (which increases accuracy by up to 300%) and fitting of GPS chips as standard in new phones and tracker devices no bigger than a grain of rice, it really does look like Big Brother will be watching you. So perhaps, at long last, a lost phone will soon be a thing of the past…. ================================ Improved Mobile Phone Tracking Accuracy Announcement from Trace A Mobile.com www.traceamobile.co.uk and www.locatemobiles.co.uk UK based Mobile phone tracking company Trace A Mobile.com today announced it was now using an advanced software system called Timing Advanced mobile phone tracking (TA) to allow improved phone tracking accuracy of up to 50 metre range for the Vodafone network. The technology measures the timing and power of GSM mobile phone signals from 3 or more base stations to increase its Location Based Services (LBS) accuracy by up to 300 per cent. Explaining the new system Managing Director Jonathan Cook said, "The timing of the bursts transmissions is very important to track mobile phones. Mobiles are at different distances from the base stations. Their delay depends, consequently, on their distance. The aim of Timing Advance is that the mobile trace signals coming from the different mobile stations arrive at the base station at the right time so it can locate a mobile much more accurately." Other new LBS technology also planned by the company is Assisted GPS. Arriving soon in the United Kingdom these new mobile phones will include a global positioning receiver and promise an accuracy of up to 10 metres for phone locating. "Trace A Mobile is pleased to be at the forefront of such new and exciting technology," added Jonathan Cook. "The last twelve months have seen our service grow rapidly with hundreds of new domestic and commercial users. We have already covered the London Marathon and Great North Run for the BBC using mobile tracking for the celebrity runners and we also assisted LBC Radio with its Radio Riders Charity Bike ride, who wanted to locate mobile phones carried on the competitors bikes." Since launching in 2003, Trace A Mobile's other mobile tracing product innovations have been the ability to receive a tracking request via SMS and the widening of coverage to include Northern Ireland. Summing up the last twelve months Jonathan adds, "We have managed to develop and lower our cost for tracking searches. Our corporate website www.locatemobiles.com is also proving popular with a wide variety of business customers, particularly in the freight and haulage business and we are currently piloting business users with the chance to track a mobile phone without the need of intrusive SMS text messages." ================================== Mobile phone tracking company www.locatemobiles.co.uk and www.traceamobile.co.uk today announced a huge rise in the number of customers registering for its mobile phone tracking technology in the UK. Since launching the new mobile tracking service in October and November 2003 the company has been signing up hundreds of new business and family customers every month. "I'm pleased to say we're going from strength to strength," said Managing Director Jonathan Cook, "and are now one of the UK's leading mobile phone tracking service providers. Locate Mobiles targets business users and our sister website Trace A mobile.com is geared towards mobile phone tracking for families. Part of our success is unlike some mobile tracking services we offer a clear pricing structure which is either a monthly or annual subscription. A monthly account costs 5 Pound and an annual 50 Pound and covers 5 to 10 phones respectively." Mobile Locators and Trace A Mobile is based in London. Since its launch the companies mobile phone tracking site has featured in The Sun, The Metro, Evening Standard, Daily Express and Daily Record newspaper and on Radio 5 Live, as well as BBC Local Radio. The company also ran a successful Christmas radio advertising campaign on Magic Radio which featured a teenage girl in a night club pretending to be round her friend's house until her mum tries mobile phone tracking. "Mobile phone tracking has a whole host of other uses though," explains Jonathan. "We are signing partnerships with vehicle tracking car manufactures as a cheaper alternative to GPS tracking and for use at major sporting events." The company recently carried out market research on the appeal of mobile phone tracking to the public. The survey of 2,160 parents revealed safety-conscious parents are buying mobile phones for children as young as four. Fears about teenage runaways and child abduction have left UK parents desperate to keep tabs on their kids. Almost two thirds of mums and dads said they would register their children's phone with an online mobile phone tracking service, if it meant they could locate the user's position anywhere in the GB, via a switched-on mobile phone. Acknowledging that mobile phone tracking provides parents with something of a moral dilemma, Jonathan Cook said:"On the one hand you want to keep an eye on your kids, but on the other you don't want to be seen to be constantly fussing or checking up on them. On balance though mobile phone tracking, combined with the already proven safety benefits of children carrying a phone, helps give parents peace of mind."
trackmobilephones.co.uk |