If i dont have mcc and msc, can i loacate a certain country only with lac&cid?
I’m not sure whether different country could have the same lac and cid.
Thanks!
Hey Hannah
There are 4 basic parts of a cell identifier: MCC-MNC-LAC-CID
- MCC-MNC is set by International Telecommunication Union. All telecom firms have access to this information as it is publicly available.
- LAC-CID can be decided by the telecom firm. This is an internal decision and telecom firms don’t share this with each other.
This ensures that no two cells have the same cellular identifier.
For the last 2 parts:
LAC -
- This is decided by a telecom firm based on its own logic. Some telecom firms decide on LAC by region, others by a cluster. If a large amount of CID’s belonging to a particular telecom firm are in a particular area, all these will likely have the same LAC. This helps telecom firms organize information.
CID -
- This is a unique id assigned to a physical cell unit.
To answer your question - yes, different countries can have cells that have the same LAC/CID. AT&T does not inform Vodafone that it’s keeping x as LAC/CID, so, it is possible that both have the same LAC/CID in different regions.
In the big picture, this does not matter as the entire identifier (MCC-MNC-LAC-CID) is always unique.
You can download the OpenCelliD database from here and select the LAC/CID’s that you want. I believe this is the fastest way for you to find what you’re looking for.
A guide to extract cells you want can be found here.
Thank you very much! I’m now fully understand that.
Okay, thanks a lot! And one more question, does the database of cell towers is the total one？
The database has over 36 million cells as of 5th Feb 2018. It contains all the cells (worldwide) contributed by the community.
Okay, I see. Once again, thank you very much, sagar~~