Does "my location" work for anyone on the new google maps

[TC1]

Originally Posted by Malatesta

I was under the distinct impression that this is cellular triangulation, which is very different than aGPS (it is far less accurate).

This is the same issue with Windows Live Search and Sprint: triangulation, not aGPS.

Malatesta, aGPS is cellular triangulation... I'll do a quick explanation here (I'm sure I've typed this a million places elsewhere, lol):

aGPS stands for assisted GPS... aGPS in many ways is actually better than stand alone GPS because the device (cell phone) doesn't have to find/receive the GPS signal from the over-head satellites. It takes additional power to receive the sat signals as opposed to just receiving the cellular network signal, thus cutting into your phone's battery life.

How does aGPS work? What it does is let the carrier's network do the computational intensive triangulation measurements (which also saves phone power).

How does this happen? Every cell tower has it's own stand-alone GPS receiver, that way every cell tower knows its own location, this will become important in a second. On the carrier's network there are computers known as Assistance Servers, these are the devices that do the actual triangulation computations. Emergency response organizations (ie, 911) have access to these servers, as do the phones themselves (as long as they are unlocked).

The details: either the cell phone or emergency services can start a query with an assistance server, the assistance server will then go out on the network and query all the cellular towers in your general area with a request such as "Hey, do any of you towers have a cell signal level for cell phone #123456?" If a tower detects the cell phone's signal it'll respond with the tower's (precise) lattitude and longitude location and the cell phone signal level. The assistance server will collect all the cell phone signal levels relative to each tower's location and then do the triangulation computation. It'll return the computed lat and long measurement back to the original requester (the cell phone or the 911 network computers).

By accessing the aGPS API for the chip in the phone, that's how a program like mGMAPS makes a phone like my wife's LG Fusic GPS capable... even though it has no stand-alone GPS capability. This is also how carrier's LBS (location based services) work on phones that aren't full blown PDAs with stand-alone GPS, etc. That's why Sprint wanted to shutdown the author of mGMAPS... he was basically giving folks for free capabilities that the carriers normally charge extra $$$ for.

Hope this explanation was clear and helpful

-TC