All GPS solution draining battery. Opportunity for operator location APIs?
The BBC’s Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, is asking UK Android users to help crowd source a UK 3G network coverage map.
The BBC is asking users to download an app from Epitiro, the company that carried out Ofcom’s broadband survey last year, and has surveyed Telia Sonera’s LTE network, amongst others. The app will provide data to build up a record where 3G services are available, and from which operator. Speeds will not be tested. The survey will run for a month.
Cellan-Jones said in a blog post:
The app will record phone signal data all the time the phone is switched on, and Epitiro is going to work with us to collect the results over the next month.
The aim is then to plot the findings on a map which will be searchable by postcode. If we succeed, this should yield some interesting results.
The idea is similar to the story we wrote about in April, detailing an app called Tracesaver that also tracks phone usage.
The time is coming, perhaps, when some operator equips its phones with a similar app, and ties the handset specific information to its wider network monitoring and management systems.
NOTE: Although if operators do something similar, they may want to build the app in a different way to the 3GSurvey app, which seems to keep GPS on permanently, with no option to turn it off except uninstalling. Obviously, the app needs access to location information, but turning GPS on permanently is going to put a heavy tax on the battery on many handsets. Something that reactivated the GPS when the user is on the move might make sense, although of course that would have to be done manually, as the app would not know the handset was on the move unless GPS was activated!
One option could have been to work with the operators to give the app access to the network location APIs. Network level location info could perhaps have “woken up” GPS when it detected the handset was on the move.
The all-GPS route is clearly cheaper and quicker. The rough and ready solution, if you like. But the opportunity still exists, perhaps, for a mobile operator itself to provide such a monitoring service to its own customers – for mutual benefit.