Is it possible to upload information about cell towers to the phone?

Question

Android

It is necessary to determine the location by cell towers (for example, if GPS, Wifi is disabled). But to do this, you need to send a request to the Internet, right?
Question 1: is it possible to download from the Internet information on GSM towers and their GPS coordinates, if it is large, for example, for a specific city, or if you download everything, then weed it out for the desired city?
Question2: is it possible to download it to the phone in order to make requests inside the mobile application if necessary?
Question 3: Will such a base weigh a lot?
Question 4: it is possible that mobile operators already have a service where you can understand the coordinates of the tower to which the phone is currently attached without the Internet (via the Android / iOS mobile application)
Question 5: Will it "eat" the phone's resources a lot if such requests are made once every 5 minutes for 24 hours?

Answer 1

Sergey : MakarkinPRO: You misunderstand triangulation. Triangulation (to determine the cell in which the subscriber is located) is performed by the network due to the fact that it knows the exact distances from several of its own bases to the subscriber. Distances are calculated by ping (minus the duration of reception and transmission of the packet by the base and terminal device) divided by the speed of light. This information is made available to the network during connection initialization. The initialization protocol requires the subscriber to respond to special ping packets instantly (you can, of course, hack the firmware, but this will not work, since in this way you can only "increase" the distance, but not decrease it, therefore it is impossible to jump from your cell to another cell ). There is no such protocol for the base, according to which it must respond to pings instantly (for GSM, it is simply unnecessary). Therefore, the subscriber does not have the opportunity to know the distance to the bases. And the signal level has nothing to do with the distance at all. Firstly, rarely located bases in the countryside have levels hundreds (!) times higher than, for example, a base on the roof of an apartment building. Secondly, due to the geometry of directional antennas, even on flat terrain, the signal level is non-linear with (square) distance. I'm not even talking about the fact that in the presence of obstacles / reflections, it makes no sense at all to look for the dependence of the distance on the level. Due to the geometry of the directional antennas, even on flat terrain, the signal level is non-linear with the (square) distance. I'm not even talking about the fact that in the presence of obstacles / reflections, it makes no sense at all to look for the dependence of the distance on the level. Due to the geometry of the directional antennas, even on flat terrain, the signal level is non-linear with the (square) distance. I'm not even talking about the fact that in the presence of obstacles / reflections, it makes no sense at all to look for the dependence of the distance on the level.
PS: Sorry, this is more related to the discussion that unfolded in the comments than to the question itself. But, perhaps, this will be useful to those who will try to triangulate the device in the cellular network on their own / means.

Answer 2

Go to opencellid.org , request an API key and download the database.

Answer 3

Netmonitor is an excellent application - it gives a database of your operator's towers, which can be saved to a file, including coordinates, signal strength. On the author's website (though I haven't visited for a long time) there was also a database of cellular stations. At one time, I was interested in the possibility, based on this, to switch to the base station I needed myself. Haven't found a solution yet. Maybe someone knows...

Answer 4

1. You can. Enthusiast sites have databases for major cities and major operators. True, the relevance of these bases is a big question.
2. There are applications for Android (for example, GSM Signal Monitoring or Netmonitor) that allow you to import data from step 1 and display information about base stations when the smartphone "sees" them.
3. The database for 30 thousand (one of the operators in Moscow) records weighs about 3 MB.
4. See point 2.
5. Power consumption may increase significantly. The smartphone may not last for a day.