location tracking through mobile network in android

Question

• recently I checked location in galaxy tab by disabling GPS and wifi and the accuracy is around 50 to 65 meters(location is rural).

• later I cleared the total cache memory of the maps app, and the device and when I checked the location under same scenario the accuracy is very bad it's around 1.2km to 2km. -Now I activated the wifi and suddenly it came under 50meters, now when I disable it even then the location shown is around 60 meters accuracy.

• Is there any way that we can find the approx location by only using mobile networks without using wifi and gps, as the device is gathering some info in to the cache and this helps when wifi and gps are disabled.

what I am asking is, can't the device use the mobile triangulation and get the accuracy around 50 meters than to depend on the cache of wifi and gps. where can we get this implementation source code of android.

PS: I want to disable wifi and gps because I want to mimic this functionality in hardware as adding wifi and gps modules is power hungry and costly.

Answer 1

In a large city, where the phone can receive a signal from several towers, then triangulation may well be fairly accurate. The only parameter that the phone can measure is signal strength, and from that infer a distance to each mast.

In a rural setting the phone may only have a signal from one mast. All that it can do then is to estimate the distance to the mast, place your position at the mast and calculate the accuracy based on that one signal strength.