Phone is how positioning?
There are three general mobile phone positioning methods.
Method 1: WIFI hotspots based on your current contact with hot spots if the query WIFI hotspots are publicly available, there is a corresponding address information. Then you can lock position within a certain radius of the location.
By locating WIFI, your location can be confirmed in a range of a certain radius, and you can not accurately identify the position, velocity.
Method 2: mobile station based positioning, your phone signal through a mobile station interaction. Mobile base station location is clear, when you can get cell phone signals from multiple base stations, and there are different base station signals the strength of different attenuation, it can position these base stations according to the situation and your signal attenuation, generally get your position range, and generally moving speed, it is within the vehicle if you have a certain speed.
Method 3: The most accurate, is through satellite positioning, you see, though WIFI, base stations, satellites, specifically near to far; but indeed more precise positioning accuracy.
So satellite positioning, in fact, also includes different options, previously GPS-dominated world, you mention satellite positioning is the GPS, but in fact there are a lot of different home satellite positioning system, GPS is still the world's largest, in addition to Galileo in Europe, China's Compass system and so on.
In fact, many domestic smart phone and satellite navigation chip already supports Beidou system, the user might see a sign or GPS, but location-based services, in fact, may come from different systems.
Then the phone will automatically select the appropriate signal strength positioning and navigation system according to, under normal circumstances, users do not need to choose which satellite systems. So you do not ask how I switched to the Beidou system, ah, the phone will use it deems appropriate under the circumstances.
How service providers to determine your location?
Many goods and services providers need your location, such as micro-channel, such as micro-blog, such as public comment, of course, not to mention the map navigation. Determine your location to provide services around, or recommend contact side, it is a very standard Internet applications. In fact, before the mobile Internet, this service is not the mainstream, usually just do recommend the city. At that time, the positioning depends mainly on the IP address, which is often used before me technical questions.
In fact, the mobile phone end user can choose whether to send their location information to the service provider, if not send your location, the service provider will judge your approximate location through your Internet IP. Of course, this is difficult to pinpoint a specific location, usually only target the city limits.
But there is a problem, is the mobile phone terminal, not real information must be reported to the service provider. There are a large number of third-party tools can fake your location, you can tell your service provider in the Antarctic, or on an island in northern Europe.
