The Unwired Labs Blog

Unwired: An alternative to PoLTE location APIs

Sagar Shewarmani — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 06:50:30 +0000

PoLTE – a provider of cloud-based location technologies – announced they’re winding down their operations and deprecating support for Location APIs. If you currently use their Cellular or WiFi based positioning, you’re looking for an reliable alternative that’s easy to switch to. We’ve received dozens of messages in the past few days from businesses that have lost visibility around their operations and want things back up and running. We, at Unwired Labs, extend our warmest greetings to businesses looking for an alternative to PoLTE’s location APIs. We’re offering an extended evaluation to businesses looking to transition away from PoLTE and are happy to meet your team halfway with integration and testing. Put us in touch with your developers and let us take care of the rest. What to look for in a location provider? Accuracy We know data quality is the most important element of any location service. If you’re using WiFi positioning, this becomes paramount, as WiFi APs are highly mobile and can be easily positioned in a different location. Only a database that’s updated at a high frequency can ensure accurate positioning. If using Cellular, your devices need a service that can recognize CatM1, NB, 5G or any newer technologies with a recent rollout. The amount of visibility you have on your devices is also dependent on the quality of triangulation algorithms in place. Unwired Labs’ LocationAPI has been improving on its algorithm for 8 years. Our geolocation APIs are backed by 200 Mil+ cells and 4Bil+ WiFi APs that are updated in real time. The confidence benchmarks behind our triangulation API are set to 99%, which translates to an accurate real world position every single time. We also use fresh data to dynamically change weightages assigned to Cell/ WiFi identifiers in our database, which impacts how triangulation is done. Reliability Location APIs are an essential component of your business operations. If your client demands GDPR compliance and high availability, it’s only natural for you to look for a provider that does the same. Your ideal location partner must be in the space for a long time and have deep expertise in positioning — else you’ll end up with another PoLTE-like situation in your hands Unwired Labs is completely GDPR compliant. We do not require your devices to directly communicate with us and we do not store the content of your API calls to our endpoints. Our data centers are georedudant, have multiple failovers, and are highly available. We offer a 99.9% uptime with options for more if required. We process over 2 billion API calls a day and serve both small and large businesses worldwide. Our enterprise customers include the likes of Vodafone, Telit, AT&T, Panasonic and more. Affordability We recognize that managing assets is a numbers game with paper-thin margins. On top of this, your platform probably supports different types of assets; some might require continuous monitoring, others need occasional lookups and some devices might even be disposable. The other scant resource is time – just as pricing, there is only so much you can afford to spend on a provider. Your core business is managing your/ your clients’ assets; everything else needs to just work, without too much time spent in development and testing. Unwired Labs accommodates your device-specific distinctions in a single package with pricing that’s customizable for each of your use cases. Our documentation is extensive and our APIs can be integrated in a couple of hours. If you’re unsure where to begin, just share the make/model of your device and we’ll share next steps. If you’re impacted by PoLTE, or are looking for a geolocation partner, reach out to us with your requirements and get a conversation started. You can signup for a free plan with Unwired Labs here.

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Note on COVID-19

Harit Rathi — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 13:33:49 +0000

These are unprecedented times not just for business but for the world. The COVID-19 crisis has impacted all of us and amidst this, our priority is to ensure the safety of our team, our customers, and the larger developer community. We want you to know that our services will be up and running, and our teams will be available for anything you may need, as usual. Our Team’s Safety To curb the spread of the virus and practice social distancing, our team has been operating fully remotely since March 16. We have equipped everyone with laptops, monitors, high-speed VPNs, video conferencing tools, and other essentials they may need while they continue to work from home to ensure your services are running smoothly. We have always had a very flexible work from home policy and this has helped us settle into the new normal comfortably. Infrastructure Back in February, when the COVID-19 crisis was looming, we spent time accessing our systemic risk. To this end, our APIs serve requests from hundreds of servers, which are located across continents, vendors and clouds. All our APIs have redundancies in place, each endpoint has multiple failover endpoints, and backups are done periodically on-site and off-site. In the unlikely event that a data center vendor is down, our services will automatically switch to work from other locations seamlessly. In sum, our infrastructure is stable. Our Financial Health Unwired Labs has been in business for nearly seven years. We are self-funded and profitable. Our operations are lean and our reserves will pull us through any force majeure events for over 36 months before we seek outside funding. Please be assured that our APIs will function normally, and our support will be as responsive as they have always been. We are happy to understand any challenges you are facing and support in any capacity that we can. We hope you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy!

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An alternative to Mapzen and Pelias

Sagar Shewarmani — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 17:01:26 +0000

Mapzen, sadly, will now be remembered in the past tense. Early this week, Mapzen announced that it will shut down all it’s services because….well, we’re not entirely sure yet. Balancing resources between commercial and the Open Source community can be extremely complex. Mapzen did a wonderful job in the past 4 years, pushing the envelope of geolocation technology forward and bringing the community ahead with them. The wealth of OpenSource data and code left behind will last long after MapZen is completely gone. Understandably, the unintended consequences of these developments left a number of businesses in trouble – businesses that rely on MapZen’s APIs for day-to-day operations. We, at LocationIQ.org extend our warmest greetings to business looking for an alternative to Mapzen’s geocoding and mapping solutions. We’re currently offering a discount of 25% – for life!. We serve thousands of developers, open-source projects, small, medium and large business worldwide – from 1k calls per day to 1Billion – we’ve got you covered. Edit: Our new Pelias endpoint is live! We now serve data from OpenStreetMap, OpenAddresses, WhosonFirst, Polylines & Geonames. LocationIQ.org is run by Unwired Labs – an enterprise geolocation solution trusted by businesses like AT&T, Gemalto, Panasonic, BBOXX, HP, Telit, Plex and more!

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The Hater app uses Unwired Labs’ Geocoding to make sense of GPS data

Priya — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 07:02:54 +0000

“At times hate can be more genuine than love” says Brendan Alper, founder of haterdater. Launched early this year, Haterdater (www.haterdater.com), has quickly scaled up and today has 120,000 active users on the app all over the world . In the highly competitive $2Bn online dating industry, Haterdater stands out by positioning itself as an app that connects people based on what they hate and not what they love. Slow walkers, poor WiFi, man buns,loud chewing are just some of the 2000 topics that people claim to hate on the app. After approximately 10 minutes of revealing their personal dislikes, users are presented with potential matches who they can then swipe left or right. Location, as one can imagine, plays an important role in deciding who shows up on your app stream as potential matches. GPS partially solves this by providing coordinates of the user – this, however doesn’t give the complete picture. This is where Unwired Geocoding steps in. The GPS co-ordinates gathered by the app are used for a process called reverse geocoding which results in the actual names of the area the users are located in. Continuing to ride high in popularity, Haterdater and its founders Jeremy Alper and Brendan Alper made an appearance in the American television series Shark Tank on the 24th of November 2017 to pitch their idea to a panel of experts. Mark Cuban agreed to invest $200,000 in exchange for 7.5 percent equity stake in the company, plus an additional 2.5 percent in advisory equity. Hater can be downloaded on iOS and Android. Please visit haterdater.com for more information, including videos and screenshots of the app.

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TrustedGPS: When GPS isn’t good enough

Sagar Shewarmani — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 08:49:50 +0000

The recent news about an Uber driver spoofing GPS to inflate fares has once-again raised questions about the reliability of GPS as a geolocation mechanism. An increasing number of businesses rely on GPS for localization & navigation. The open nature of GPS has made it’s way into almost every business application. Some businesses use it to tailor user experiences, while others have completely built their business models around it. Consumer GPS, like the one used by your customers, come from satellites orbiting the earth. This service, while free, has a couple of major issues, making it vulnerable to spoofing and jamming. You can see how we fooled Google Maps into thinking we were in California. (Video below or on youtube) Why GPS isn’t good enough It is not encrypted Encrypted GPS systems are used in military applications. These encrypted systems make GPS a little more secure (although, not entirely). Applying some form of encryption would help – but this isn’t going to happen. Open de-encrypted GPS is the prime reason why it is so widely used by businesses. The signals aren’t strong enough: Every satellite based navigation system share a fundamental weakness as they rely on signals from satellites transmitting from an altitude of around 12 thousand miles, the signals are very weak, making them vulnerable to accidental or deliberate interference. It’s too easy to spoof Simple apps available on the Google AppStore give people the ability to trick any app into thinking that they’re in a location they actually aren’t. Software spoofing is as simple as clicking a button. There is no need to root the device or learn programming. If you want to completely jam the GPS signal to an external device. You can just buy a GPS jammer for as low as $12.99. What can we do about it? A smart way to address the problem is to combine existing technologies to build a secure tracking solution. There already exists a secure infrastructure – Firms & governments have spent decades developing cellular coverage around the world. Layering GPS results with Cell+WiFi based geolocation give firms a much needed asset recovery apparatus that results in mitigation of risks. This technology is built from the ground up to be simple, modular and reliable. To learn more about TrustedGPS – and get access to over 115 million cell towers/ 1.5 billion WiFi access points around the world – write to us at [email protected]

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BBOXX replaces GPS with Unwired LocationAPI

Priya — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 06:21:49 +0000

At Unwired, a few things make our day that much brighter. At the top of the list? News about our customers doing impactful things to make the world a better place! BBOXX, a SMART Solar company, and one of our early customers, has been in the spot-light for all the good reasons! They recently hit a fantastic milestone of electrifying over 100,000 households, in more than 35 countries, and improving the lives of more than 500,000 people. The Plan Their primary product, SMART Solar, is an internet connected Solar Home System which is sold on a payment plan and remotely monitored and maintained. The service offering is a web tool which allows BBOXX and third-party distributors to manage their portfolio of SMART products. The service includes the ability to view the rough location of units and plot these on a map. This allows distributors and managers to see the rough location of an individual unit or show at a country level where products are being sold. This location information is also used to improve the quality and reliability of remote fault diagnostics. The Challenge Locating things, in general, need a GPS device and a mobile network module to communicate to and fro. GPS devices are not cheap and installing one device for every Solar unit they sell could potentially end up with huge costs, in millions of dollars. This cost has to be passed on to the consumer of the product, else the company loses money and probably close business. BBOXX is a rapidly growing company in the East African region where people earn lot lesser than the Westerns or the Europeans. With their incomes, they couldn’t afford these extra costs. The Solution : Cell-ID based Location service Unwired Labs, a company pioneering in Cell-ID and WiFi based Location services, has allowed BBOXX to reduce both the upfront product cost and ongoing running costs. This was made possible by removing GPS tracking modules from Solar units. Instead, the location of the units are determined by Unwired Labs’ LocationAPI based just on cell towers visible to the unit. BBOXX investigated multiple options for Cell-ID based location services and found Unwired to provide the most accurate coverage in rural areas of East Africa where they operate. On top of this, BBOXX was able to make use of its local staff’s GPS-enabled smartphones to improve the accuracy further. These two features combined with an API which is very easy to integrate with and favourable pricing made the decision to progress with Unwired Labs very simple. “We looked at a number of different services and found the best in every way was Unwired Labs, based on results, coverage, price and performance.” Ashley Grealish Engineering, BBOXX BBOXX is leading The Solar Revolution by offering an on-grid experience in an off-grid world powered through a unique financing model to sell solar systems to the mass market on a monthly payment plan. BBOXX leads and manages all aspects of its business operations – engineered from its lab in London, manufactured in its factory in China, followed by distribution to partners in 35 countries and 30 local shops in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

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GPS isn’t good enough for your pet tracker

Sagar Shewarmani — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 06:33:07 +0000

One in ten pets are lost to never return at some point in their lifetime. Back in the day, pug-shots and posters were the only option for identifying and getting our furry friends back. But the times have changed and so has pet safety. There are so many pet-tracking options available in the market that use the latest geolocation technologies, letting pet-parents keep an eye on their cats/dogs…or any pettable animals. A pet-friendly tracking device has to be small enough to not weigh down or annoy the four-legged child and once it’s on, it should be on for a while. A pet-friendly tracking device has to be small enough to not weigh down or annoy the four-legged child and once it’s on, it should be on for a while. It should work even in the nooks and crannies it sneaks into – those underground tunnels, old buildings and others the pique their curiosity. Also, it shouldn’t be too conspicuous, incase pet-stealers are on duty and want to take it off asap. Considering all these limitations, a GPS-only device wouldn’t be the best option – It’s usually on the heavier side, the poor battery life of such devices would mean constant handling to remove the device to recharge it and it goes off the map as soon as it’s in a closed space. So what can we do about this? Cell+Wifi based geolocation! Here’s the answer: Cell Wifi geolocation! The best part is, it’s already in use! Many of the latest devices use a combination of positioning technologies – Cellular, Wifi and GPS. Each of these has it’s pros and cons when used on it’s own, but with their powers combined, it’s nearly impossible to lose them. Trackimo, Kippy and Pod are some of the popular devices out there (they also happen to be happy customers of ours!). These devices are tied to apps which can be easily accessed on smartphones/tablets to control the settings and pinpoint it’s location on online maps. Cell-based geolocation works in places GPS can’t reach, such as underground, places obscured by large rocks or under concrete! The combination of Cell + Wifi based tracking alone is on par with GPS. It has nearly the same accuracy. It uses a simple chip/SIM Card that gathers signals from nearby Cell towers and Wifi-access points to triangulate its geographical position. A Location API (such as Unwired’s) converts this information into physical addresses that can be located on a map. Cell-based geolocation works in places GPS can’t reach, such as underground, places obscured by large rocks or under concrete! It also definitely drains the battery juices much slower than GPS does. Here’s to more amazing solutions for tracking and safety and to never losing our little (or big) friends. Drop us a line at [email protected] explore how Cell-based geolocation can be useful for your pet tracker.

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OpenCelliD by Unwired Labs

Aravind — Tue, 02 May 2017 10:03:02 +0000

There have been a few exciting changes at OpenCelliD, the largest Open Database of Cell Towers, over the past week and I’m here to update you about it. Markus Semm, the man who built and brought OpenCelliD to where it is today, has transferred its maintainership responsibilities to Unwired Labs. In the past few years, OpenCelliD was funded by Markus’ personal funds and he’s taken care of all the development and infrastructure efforts and have single-handedly cleaned up the datasets and made it a reliable source. He believed it was time for it to grow further under a new custodian. Who are we? Unwired Labs is a leading geolocation company that specialises in Cell-tower & WiFi based positioning. We’ve been around for 4 years, but in this short while, we’ve rapidly built our partnership networks for data, helped thousands of developers/ startups create better products. How is it going to help? We believe in open-source and realize that it is a major contributor to geolocation services. We aim to improve OCIDs datasets, modernize its infrastructure and take it towards becoming a major open-source dataset for Cell, WiFi, IoT Wide area Networks. Unwired is entirely focused on geolocation, so it gives us incentive to share our resources and support the community. What does this mean for you? Better data that provides your apps and devices better locations! Also, you won’t have to worry about having to adapt to anything new. All the changes will happen at our end. Your contributions and tokens will stay intact and you will be able to download the database and request removal of your data – just like it was before. We will make sure the transition is smooth. Most importantly it stays open! We’re really proud and excited to have been handed over this responsibility and are very excited to work with the community! Onward, Gopi Aravind CEO, Unwired

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NEW: WiFi Positioning Service

Aravind — Tue, 12 May 2015 10:48:52 +0000

This morning we began rolling out the much awaited WiFi Positioning service to all our customers & developers. The service is built on a large, growing database of over 550 million access-points world over. Best of all, it’s available at no additional charge! What this means for you – if you have products / devices that can detect nearby WiFi access-points – is much better accuracies (usually between 5 and than 30 meters) globally! Head to the API Docs to start locating with WiFi! NEW: API Sandbox We’ve also redesigned the API sandbox so you can have a go at WiFi location Start locating with the sandbox here!

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GPS trackers that work #everywhere, from Aspenta

Priya — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 07:26:42 +0000

A number of awesome products launched at CES 2015. The one we were looking forward to the most was Aspenta’s Vectu Locators; and we weren’t disappointed. They work everywhere, help save money on global deployments and look fabulous. Oh, and they use the Unwired Labs LocationAPI. 🙂 We quizzed Ribal Zwein, their Product Development Director about the new product launch, and how he liked working with our API. Can you tell our community more about your products? Our main Product Lines are Vectu Locators and UbGate. Vectu Locators are a versatile, multi-purpose set of trackers that can be used anywhere in the world at a low flat rate as they come with built-in global roaming. They support switching between multiple use-cases such as a SOS Tracker, a Live Vehicle Tracker, an Alarm Tracker or even a personal Locate-on-Demand Device. Aspenta is a US-based telecom operator primarily focussed on developing products and solutions for the M2M and IOT space. What was the problem you faced for which you needed to use a Cell ID based Location API? The major challenge when developing a Tracker is the ability to provide a location at anytime of the day, in any place or in any weather condition. Relying solely on GPS signal is not an option. Assisted GPS incurs a high cost of data while roaming, so the best alternative was to enhance our positioning system (UbLocate) by implementing Cellular Based triangulation, and this is where LocationAPI proved to be a great technology. Can you tell us how you use the Unwired Labs’ LocationAPI to solve this problem? With the enhanced UbLocate, our end-customers could pin-point the location of their loved ones, possessions or vehicles even if they are indoors or underground. Our Trackers send Neighboring Cell information to an interface implemented with LocationAPI servers allowing UbLocate to render an approximate location. “Unwired Labs provided an excellent solution, easy to use and implement at the most affordable price; not to mention their unlimited support during our evaluation phase and during implementation.” Ribal Zwein, Product Development Director, Aspenta Thank you for the kind words, Ribal!

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