LTE and OpenCelliD for geolocation?

• This is a report on an idea that we had and the feasibility of it, hence the question mark in the title.
• The idea was to take the information returned by an LTE Modem and map it to the geo-location of the mobile tower where it is connected to in that point in time.
• The mapping would be done using the information from the available OpenCelliD databases which can be downloaded.
• http://wiki.opencellid.org/wiki/Menu_map_view

• We tested using the reply from this command uqmi -d /dev/cdc-wdm0 –get-system-info.
• From it we could get the following:

• Doing a search through the CSV file for that combination unfortunately resulted in none found .
• This test was using a Cell C sim card. We also tried a Vodacom sim card that also returned no results.
• The next test we did was in Greece with the hope that the OpenCelliD database for Greece will have more up to date and complete information.

• In Greece we used the following for our search, based on the reply from our LTE router.

• Searching through the available data for Greece from OpenCelliD also yielded no results.

• We then fed the values to OpenCelliD's API.
• Finally we got results but with this message in the reply

{
    "status": "ok",
    "balance": 4998,
    "lat": -26.535781,
    "lon": 27.907425,
    "accuracy": 35377,
    "message": "This cell tower was not found in OpenCelliD. However, we served a location from the Unwired Labs LocationAPI (unwiredlabs.com), an Enterprise Geolocation service with over 100 million cell towers.",
    "aged": "1",
    "address": "Ilona Road, Debonair Park, Emfuleni Ward 21, Emfuleni Local Municipality, Sedibeng District Municipality, Gauteng, 1884, South Africa"
}

• OpenCelliD had to use a third party to locate the tower (with an accuracy of 35km).
• We realised that it is currently not possible or practical when using the downloadable data from OpenCelliD.