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Is there anything that the deputy prime minister isn't ignorant of?
The worrying thing is that as this is a Written Answer, so there is a whole team of Sir Humphreys who must have read and approved each word in the Answer, before it was rubber stamped by the junior Minister.
Obviously if the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott himself had been answering the question, the quality of the Answer would have been, ahem, different.
Have I missed something, or does the question make no mention of "tracking criminals"? It doesn't make sense. (BTW, I think you'll find most LBS are based on the GSM/UMTS core network. As the HLR knows which cell each phone is in, it's a trivial task to scrape that data off in a suitable form to plug into another application)
@ Alex - No you did not miss anything in the perfectly reasonable Parliamentary Question. It is the insight into the technological prejudices of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the NuLabour Minister Jim Fitzpatrick, which is so worrying.
What you say about the Home Location Register (HLR) is of course true. Location Based Services are usually integrated into some form of Geographical Information System map, either in the Emergency Services control rooms, or Electronic Tagging control rooms, or, via a website for the commercial mobile phone tracking services sold to the public.
One of the requirements under the UK Government's Voluntary Code of Practice on Communications Traffic Data Retention under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, and presumably under the new European Union Directive, is that current and historical mobile phone cell transmitter locations and identifying numbers (which can change quite a lot, as networks grow or are merged) is to be provided to the authorities. How this was meant to work with international phone calls was never made clear.
The Voluntary Code of Practice even tried to get mobile phone location data to be stored as latitude and longitude coordinates, without, of course, (Home Office - 'nuff said) bothering to specify the required degree of accuracy.
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/07/mandatory_data_retention_of_co.html
...which is a non-trivial problem, seeing as there are a shitload of picocell sites in urban centres, often within metres of each other, not to mention the vertical dimensions.
Surely it would be more useful to keep OS grid refs? (BTW, I wanted to point out that contrary to one possible reading of the post, TETRA/Airwave doesn't triangulate on mobiles or anything like that, and that LBS are generally provided with core-network data rather than any radio access network monitoring technology being used)
Doesn't Orange already offer a more accurate triangulation from accurately position fixed base stations, as an enhancement to their standard Location Based Services called Orange Cell ID ?
If they are already storing signal strength or
the approximate distance from the base station to the handset derived from the Timing Advance Value time delay correction factor, for this premium business service, how difficult would it be to do the same for all their mobile phones ?
They they might not let the non-premium customers have access to this data, but if it is stored in the core network, then the Communications Traffic Data Retention grabbers will want to get their mittens on it.
You can get an idea of how many Mobile Phone (and Airwave) transmitters there are in your area (but not the pico-cells) from the, not that up to date, Ofcom SiteFinder website interactive map.