Yes, some do. I guess in the U.S. the phone companies are more willing
to sell access to this info than in Europe.

There's a guy who biked around the entirety of inner Amsterdam (The
Netherlands), with 5 cell phones running a custom j2me program
bluetoothing data to a notebook in his backpack, along with a GPS
receiver doing the same. I'm going to offer him a beer and and ask for
the database, and see if I can build a 'heuristic locator' that uses
relative signal strengths of -every- cell tower in range (regardless
of its owner) to match this against a database to figure out where you
are most likely located. That's the kind of community effort I'm
talking about.

Heck, even the iPhone 3G's GPS sucks so badly, especially in the urban
jungle where, if this system is going to work at all, it's going to
work very very well. You can leave GPS for strolls through the actual
jungle or when out in the middle of nowhere.

On Nov 27, 12:08 pm, BoD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Excellent info, thanks!
>
> About the cell locations, I may be mistaken, but don't the phone
> companies sell these databases? If not, how would Google maps and other
> services that use the cells to get a location work?
>
> BoD
>
> Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
> > Correction for the posse:
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