google maps, cellid to location - coordinates

Question

According to this sample:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/DeepCast.aspx
It's possible to request a gps coordinate (longitude & latitude) including range when sending cellid information (MCC, MNC, towerid, etc)
Can someone tell me the actual parameter to request/post to this address?
http://www.google.com/glm/mmap
It could be something like this
http://www.google.com/glm/mmap?mcc=xxx&mnc=xxx&towerid=xxx
And i would like to know what response we would get.
I have observe OpenCellid website and they provide some nice API to begin with, but i want to know about that in google map too (since they have more completed database).
OpenCellID API

Answer 1

Here is example for work with
#!/usr/bin/python
country = 'fr'
#device = 'Sony_Ericsson-K750'
device = "Nokia N95 8Gb"
user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)'
mmap_url = 'http://www.google.com/glm/mmap'
geo_url = 'http://maps.google.com/maps/geo'
from struct import pack, unpack
from httplib import HTTP
import urllib2
def fetch_latlong_http(query):
http = HTTP('www.google.com', 80)
http.putrequest('POST', '/glm/mmap')
http.putheader('Content-Type', 'application/binary')
http.putheader('Content-Length', str(len(query)))
http.endheaders()
http.send(query)
code, msg, headers = http.getreply()
result = http.file.read()
return result
def fetch_latlong_urllib(query):
headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }
req = urllib2.Request(mmap_url, query, headers)
resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
response = resp.read()
return response
fetch_latlong = fetch_latlong_http
def get_location_by_cell(cid, lac, mnc=0, mcc=0, country='fr'):
b_string = pack('>hqh2sh13sh5sh3sBiiihiiiiii',
21, 0,
len(country), country,
len(device), device,
len('1.3.1'), "1.3.1",
len('Web'), "Web",
27, 0, 0,
3, 0, cid, lac,
0, 0, 0, 0)
bytes = fetch_latlong(b_string)
(a, b,errorCode, latitude, longitude, c, d, e) = unpack(">hBiiiiih",bytes)
latitude = latitude / 1000000.0
longitude = longitude / 1000000.0
return latitude, longitude
def get_location_by_geo(latitude, longitude):
url = '%s?q=%s,%s&output=json&oe=utf8' % (geo_url, str(latitude), str(longitude))
return urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
if __name__ == '__main__':
print get_location_by_cell(20465, 495, 3, 262)
print get_location_by_cell(20442, 6015)
print get_location_by_cell(1085, 24040)
print get_location_by_geo(40.714224, -73.961452)
print get_location_by_geo(13.749113, 100.565327)

Answer 2

You could use the Google Location API which is used by Firefox (Example see at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/ ) which has the url www.google.com/loc/json/. In fact this is JSON based webservice and a minimal Perl Example Look like this:
use LWP;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("TestApp/0.1 ");
$ua->env_proxy();
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'https://www.google.com/loc/json');
$req->content_type('application/jsonrequest');
$req->content('{"cell_towers": [{"location_area_code": "8721", "mobile_network_code": "01", "cell_id": "7703", "mobile_country_code": "262"}], "version": "1.1.0", "request_address": "true"}');
# Pass request to the user agent and get a response back
my $res = $ua->request($req);
# Check the outcome of the response
if ($res->is_success) {
print $res->content;
} else {
print $res->status_line, "\n";
return undef;
}
Please keep in mind that Google has not officially opened this API for other uses...

Answer 3

The new place for the Google location API is the following :
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geolocation/intro
With this API, you can retrieve a location from Cell information (cellid, mcc, mnc, and lac)

Answer 4

Base on GeolocationAPI, here are some parts of my code:
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
//http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/
import com.google.gson.stream.JsonWriter;
...
/**
* Requests latitude and longitude from Google.
*
* #param gsmParams
* {#link GsmParams}
* #return an {#link HttpURLConnection} containing connection to Google
* lat-long data.
* #throws IOException
*/
public HttpURLConnection requestLatlongFromGoogle(GsmParams gsmParams)
throws IOException {
// prepare parameters for POST method
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
JsonWriter jw = new JsonWriter(sw);
try {
jw.beginObject();
jw.name("host").value("localhost");
jw.name("version").value("1.1.0");
jw.name("request_address").value(true);
jw.name("cell_towers");
jw.beginArray().beginObject();
jw.name("cell_id").value(gsmParams.getCid());
jw.name("location_area_code").value(gsmParams.getLac());
jw.name("mobile_network_code").value(gsmParams.getMnc());
jw.name("mobile_country_code").value(gsmParams.getMcc());
jw.endObject().endArray().endObject();
} finally {
try {
jw.close();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
}
try {
sw.close();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
}
}
final String JsonParams = sw.toString();
final String GoogleLocJsonUrl = "http://www.google.com/loc/json";
// post request
URL url = null;
HttpURLConnection conn = null;
url = new URL(GoogleLocJsonUrl);
conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setConnectTimeout((int) 30e3);
conn.setReadTimeout((int) 30e3);
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
conn.getOutputStream().write(JsonParams.getBytes());
conn.getOutputStream().flush();
conn.getOutputStream().close();
int resCode = conn.getResponseCode();
if (resCode == Http_BadRequest || resCode != Http_Ok) {
throw new IOException(String.format(
"Response code from Google: %,d", resCode));
}
return conn;
}
The object GsmParams is just a Java bean containing GSM parameters MCC, MNC, LAC, CID. I think you can create a same class easily.
After getting connection, you can call conn.getInputStream() and get results from Google Maps. Then use JsonReader to parse data...

Answer 5

As noted in other threads also check out https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/mobile-location/documentation/cell-id-look-up-api for a free cell-ID database to get coordinates from cellid, mcc, mnc, and lac .