What means the "MAC" number at CellTowers

[Patois]

Hey there
When collecting WIFIs I'm also collecting the Celltowers (GSM,LTE etc.). What does there the number mean in the MAC field? I'm assuming its not like a MAC adress because the number is formated differently (eg. xxxxx_xxxx_xxxxxxxx). What do the numbers mean and is each number an other CellTower? Or gives the number only informations about my phone connection and varies everytime my phone connects again? Because I want to trace how many different celltowers I already connected to.
Thankyou!

[arkasha]

it varies by signal type. Notably CDMA (SID_NID_BID) is quite different from GSM/UMTS (MCC+MNC_LAC_CID).
for CDMA. the blocks of numbers indicate:
system, network, billing

for GSM/UMTS
country code + network code, location area code, and individual cell id.

There's a lot more nuance, check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-divi ... ple_access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_Cell_ID

[i_do_dew]

Arkasha, you should contact the developer of SignalCheck Pro. They have celltower tracking application that is equally as strong as WIGLE andbit captures much more than just nid-bid-sid which are CDMAish. while the providers are claiming they are shutting down CDMA, in reality its just standalone CDMA towers there is still a CDMA BID being piggybacked onto the LTE GCI signal.

[i_do_dew]

I was talking with a Verizon Engineer a couple of days ago and they claimed the Piggybacked BID was going to go away at the end of 2022. Personally I'll believe it when I see it. However that means you should probably step up detection of the LTE formatted ID's (GCI/PCI/TAC). If you record the the GCI as a hex string, the LSB is equivalent to the sector and a least for the B4 towers I've seen its always (0c/16/20)so for a tower that is 01120exx.

https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/commen ... _app_data/ confirms that

[arkasha]

Regarding Signal Check - looks like they query online databases (or package external data for on-device access) for some of that information. Regarding the rest (the additional signal strength characteristics), our upload format is relatively simple, we don't have slots for most of the additional data. This being said, if you wanted to incorporate it on-device, you're very welcome to submit a pull request at https://github.com/wiglenet/wigle-wifi-wardriving

Regarding the IDs - we don't record these as hex, so should be immune. As with all things on Android, we are fundamentally subject to Google's APIs and capabilities.

Cheers, and keep on stumbling!

-a

[i_do_dew]

If they do, my fire-walling them doesn't appear to have an effect on how the application functions. The Database which is stored locally has a cookie trial with the signal strengths of the respective towers but that is a feature you need to turn on in the settings. The only time the pro version seems to need to get online is if you enable the ping function and if it needs to do an address lookup when "here" is selected when putting a note in. That note entry is where it 'places' the tower for distance measurement purposes. So I try to be as close to the base of the tower as I can get when I log the location. It doesn't seem to use the cookie trail for transliteration of the tower location, but you can if you have the cookies turned on.