GPS is only as good as the receiver you use it with

Ill counter that if GPS is good enough for Aircraft, Shipping, and such, it should be good enough on the consumer level without WiFi as a crutch. And it is, with a good receiver at least. They're standalone and don't exactly come cheap if they're any good.

Im not sure but it seems to be that Android and iPhone manufacturers use the cheapest small GPS receivers they can get so the signal reception winds up sucking everywhere and its simply unusable indoors. I dont know if this is the case or not, as I dont know much about smartphone hardware aside from the radio transceivers and how they operate.

In the US Military we use a handheld GPS receiver called a DAGR and on several occasions playing with them indoors while I was bored, or while calibrating a few of them I noticed none of them dropped the signals even in hardened locations like my phone would. And this was on the civil channels without the Crypto key in it to enable the P(Y)-code Military channels. Really, the key to getting good GPS reception is just if you have a good receiver or not. Unless LightSquared has their way with the FCC of course. Then you'd may as well kiss low-end GPS goodbye according to the Air Force, who operate the GPS system. Generally I dont trust network operators, but the Air Force has no real financial incentive to say that. They don't make any money off GPS, the Space Industry and GPS equipment manufacturers do. Granted the Space Industry is Boeing and Lockheed-Martin (SpaceX isn't quite there yet in my opinion, very close though and they'll do more in 5 years to reinvigorate the industry, which is WAY overdue) and they do give financial incentives to the Air Force in just about every way imaginable. But even then, the Air Force isnt making money from the system. Hell they're actually saving money. Inertial Navigation systems were clumsy and expensive, and nowadays they're highly accurate but still expensive.

Now, theoretically you could make a publicly available civil positioning system based off of WiFi or Wireless Telephony that would work pretty well and in fact I know the GSM standard carriers do this based on their towers in North America for E911 location finding. Google may well be doing this for precisely that reason, as an alternative to GPS with the same level of accuracy AND an API to sell, like they're doing with Google Maps now.

If you don't move far with the GPS switched off, it should not matter. The GPS will look for whichever satellites it expects to be in sight now based on the ephemeris data it has stored and the current time. That is a warm start. If the GPS is not where it was when last used, it hasn't got the correct time, or current data then it needs to cold start: searching for any satellite in view. Given the correct time, approximate position and ephemeris data, it can look for the most likely satellites rather than try each in turn including those currently on the other side of the world.

The Antenna is as important as the Receiver

I would respectfully suggest that the antenna is the most important element in any GPS system, for no matter how good a receiver is, without a decent signal, no receive will work.

Antennae on any cell/handphone is a compromise at best, nothing works better than an optimised antenna dedicated to a single purpose.

And cells aren't always the greatest locators. government here has mandated that certain levels of service must be maintained as the Traffic Police, along with the Internal Security police, use certain networks for national communications.

As a result several cellco's have fleets of mobile cell base stations, over 200, that drive from one location to another to meet this government mandate. Recently there was another popular bull festival held in the north of he country and several cell base identifiers there were those I had seen in SaiGon for the Tet festival. These vehicles are also deployed during floods and other natural disasters or when there is a cell base failure or relocation.

Whilst it is great that Google now allows us to tag WiFi access points, why couldn't they use a simple 2-character designator?

I agree, the receiver is only a part of it

Yeah I agree with that too, I was just simplifying my point defining the Receiver as all inclusive with the antennas as part and parcel with the receiver as a whole. Antennas are very important, I remember the stupid foldable antennas we had on our radios in Afghanistan, signal reception there sucks anyway and if you have the antenna folded and strapped down you're lucky to be able to talk to the next net over geographically much less your own net while you're operating in secure mode where they frequency hop faster than a cellphone.

I was a Signals Intelligence Collector, we learn ALOT about radio engineering during our advanced training.

All well and good, until your router gets nicked for impersonating a Police van.....

Me,

I named mine p0rnnet256, and now the church next door stays off it.

They don't have a right to this information.

You gave it away.

Learn the difference.

You can take it back if you want.

HOLY CRAP!!!

How did you know what my network name is?

Errm

perhaps Satellites don't work when you are indoors... Dumbass.

Indoors...

I suppose it all depends. Mine works just fine around the house and in most offices. Even so, the tower location data still gets you located pretty well.

Paris works fine around the house, too.

"It's not like they can pinpoint it to your exact house either"

Can they not????? Google spy-mobile grabs your SSID/MAC address and knows your general location, You connect to the interwebs using your own wifi/router and smart phone so now they have that information, they have your browsing history as well, perhaps even details from facebook/linkedin etc.

There are lots of was to get information from databases using statistical queries, the usual example given is finding someone’s salary when you are only allowed to see aggregate data. Similarly, tack down a tally-man (the people who monitor votes at elections) and see how they analyse data, you be surprised what that can figure out about the political views of people living in a couple of streets.

As usual a lot of people are missing the point, ‘knowing’ things about particular people is not an issue, its what you do with the information is the issue, and google are still building their database.

BB nach!