Question about tracking user in a map application using cellid

I am trying to understand the concept of cellid (http://www.opencellid.org/api)

As per that, if we send a request

http://www.opencellid.org/cell/get?key=myapikey&mnc=1&mcc=2&lac=200&cellid=234

it will respond with the latitude and longitude开发者_Go百科.

I was wondering if this can be used from within a google map application for tracking a user or it needs to be used from within a mobile device?

If it can be used from within a web app, what parameters should it use for

mcc: mobile country code (decimal) mnc: mobile network code (decimal) lac: locale area code (decimal) cellid: value of the cell id

E.g., will it work if we know the cell number of the person(e.g., 281 222 6700)

The request is just a lookup in the opencellid database.

It doesn't matter where the information is coming from.
If you know the MMC, MNC, LAC and CellID of a user/mobile device,
the request will return latitude and longitude if the cellID has been found in the DB.

There is no additional information transfered by using the request from within a J2ME app.
MCC+MNC+LAC+CELLID should be a unique identifier of a cell. (afaik those values can change over time, but they still should be unique.)

More often than not, knowing just the LAC and CellID is sufficient.

However, you can't use this to track based on a number, only by cell tower parameters. Number tracking is a whole different ball game with VRL & HRL lookups which are hard to come by, very expensive ($100+ per lookup) and sometimes even illegal.

Google Maps also uses cell ID lookups to approximate the user's location before GPS kicks in (the translucent circle around a dot is actually data from Cell IDs).

That being said, opencellid has very minimal coverage and little or no updates to the project. Check out some paid players who offer wider coverages:

LocationAPI

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