What does Cell Network Search do?

If you read through all the hundreds of posts earlier in the year after the whole "locationgate" businees hit the press, you can figure out that these now openly acknowledged services relate to the same information Apple has been collecting from its mobile device users for over a year or more.

http://www.macstories.net/news/breaking-apple-responds-to-location-log-scrutiny- with-extensive-qa-response/

(see item #8 in the QA)

The actual press release from Apple - http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27Apple-Q-A-on-Location-Data.html

While there is less information on the overt Location System Services listed in iOS 5 specifically, it seems pretty clear to me that all they did was move the information from a hidden log file on your phone to openly acknowledged services that you may opt in or out of.

I know some people think something like cell tower search somehow enhances thier phones connection, but stop and think about it for a mintue. A cell phone is just an omni-directional 2-way radio. It takes a fraction of a second for it to scan the assigned carriers bandwidth to detect tower signals, handshake with the strongest available signal and establish the cellular service connection. Why on earth would it need to run a program to check its location with some database of tower locations and then start scanning for one? That whole process would be phenomenally slower and more complex than just having the radio constantly scan for the best signal within it's assigned bandwidth and with which it can complete a handshake with.

The cell tower search feature provides location based info to Apple to aid in their location services by non-GPS fix (ie. cell tower triangulation), as well as giving them data to potentially sell back to the carriers about use and connection congestion of their networks. Eg. where and when is the most iPhone use occuring on AT&T, or Verizon, which cities have the most consistent use, are they using corporate towers, leased towers, or internationally roaming somewhere. And don't forget, google collects similar data from Android users so the carriers could purchase access to data that lets them compare what their vairious device users are doing, where and when. That lets them target sales, promotions, specific regional advertising, infrastructure build-out schedules and all sorts of useful things.

The one I do not know about is the compass calibration. As I say, disabling it does not impede your compass app from actually calibrating when it prompts you to, not does it affect any location based display feature in the Maps app (or in my Motion GPS app or any other map app I have). Since the reason the compass needs calibration in the first place is due to electronic interferance, perhaps it provides information on where/when iPhone users are experiencing interference, and where location based services might experience errors. Note that Android users can now get map location data inside malls and such, which must use cell signal triangulation (since no cell phone I've ever used gets a GPS signal inside a big building like a mall), and those are also likely to be areas with tons of interferance, so location based services inside buildings (ones with internal cell service antennae) might benefit from such data.

Again, I'm not inherently against this data collection, and people can choose to participate if they think it worthwhile or if they see some of the potential uses as benefitting them in the long run. I however have disabled all six of those Location Based System Services just because I don't want them running. Even if they where to only decrease my battery life by a tiny percentage, I'd prefer to not have them running at all.

And we won't even get into the economic/social philosophy of why I should blindly particapte in something for nothing, when that something gains the collector of the data potential huge revenue gains over the long term.

Frozen1968 wrote:

I noticed on both our iPads in settings>location services>system services that Cell Network Search is always running(has a purple triangle next to it.) This seems to be new with ios 5. I disabled this along with Setting Time Zone beacause they were preventing other apps from finding my current location through location services. Does anyone know what Cell Network Search actually does? I thought it might have something to do with 3G but my 3G is working fine with it disabled. It would be nice to know what this is! Thanks.

Cell Network Search is a location based service that sends your location information, and the tower ids of the network towers within range of (and thus detected by) your phone. It is used by Apple marketing (and whomever they choose to sell/share the database with) to determine patterns of cell useage, tower congestion and so on.

Those features in System Services are all about sending your location based information TO Apple, not about enabling features or services on your iPhone. This is Apple's way of allowing you to opt out of the collection of location based data that previously was done surriptiously without overtly letting you know or have any way to stop it.

You can disable every single feature in that section and your iPhone or iPad will continue to function exactly the same way it always has.

The only one that has anything to do with your use is the time zone feature, but you'd only actually need that one on IF you were outside of range of any cellular towers and wanted your time zone set by your GPS location. If you turn it off, but leave the time&date setting on "automatic" then your time zone will be determined by the time signal received from the wireless towers your device connects to.

it trys to search your location whichever App is searching and it looks at

cellular, Wi-Fi, and Global Positioning System networks to determine your approximate location.

see this article.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4995

also some other information on the iOS 5 user guide on page 120.

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/ipad_user_guide.pdf

Nothing concrete, but as a part of this thread, the following KB article was cited: iOS 7: Understanding Location Services

In it, towards the end, it says:

Crowd-sourced Wi-Fi and cellular Location Services

If Location Services is on, your device will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple to augment Apple's crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations. In addition, if you're traveling (for example, in a car) and Location Services is on, a GPS-enabled iOS device will also periodically send GPS locations and travel speed information in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple to be used for building up Apple's crowd-sourced road traffic database. The crowd-sourced location data gathered by Apple doesn't personally identify you.

Given this, I would assume that the "cell network search" is part of that crowd-sourcing. The phone is transmitting cell tower, Wi-Fi hotspot and GPS data to Apple in order to maintain that database of locations. I assume that the "traffic" setting is for its reporting of GPS and speed information.

If you don't want to participate (maybe to preserve battery life, or if you don't trust the anonymity of the data), turning the settings off shouldn't hurt. It will simply mean that your phone won't contribute to the database. If you are in a populated area where there are lots of iOS users, it won't matter at all. If you are out in the country where you might be the only iPhone for miles around, then the database for your location may not get updated much, possibly affecting accuracy. You may or may not care about that.

WRT the compass setting, I think the reader who mentioned the "true north" setting has it right. I think the Compass app uses your location (received via all the usual means) to look up the current magnetic-north deviation from an on-line database. It will use that to correct the compass. If this isn't something you care about, go ahead and turn it off - you'll get an accurate magnetic compass reading but without the ability to compute true-north from it.

Sure no problem. I can say for a fact the camera usage is not true because I've only notice cell network search using location services once my phone tries to regain signal. In fact you can test it by enabling the status bar icon for system services and toggling airplane mode.

Anyway I think your right. I still need to do more testing to be sure though.

Hi there i too have stumbled across this setting never noticed it before i am in the uk with vodafone and checked my mates 4s who is with orange and he dosent have the setting there???we both running on 5.1 . Then i checked another friends whos on orange and he had it ?

I think the cell network search is looking for the closest cell towers based on your location. I was traveling last week and my battery was dieing really fast, about 10% an hour with hardly any use. So i turned off cell network search and all 3g data and the problem went away. Now that im back home, i turned them both back on, but my battery seems to be dieng faster than when i left. I'm just wondering how necessary the cell network search is... I think i will turn it off for a while and see if my battery life improves. I live in a big city, so always finding the closest tower does not seem necessary to me. It might be a good thing for when you are driving around in rural areas though..

Frozen,

I noticed a similar drain this past weekend and was showing it to a co-worker today. I found for me that my Location Services icon was on though no application was running. I assumed it was for System Services and proceeded to turn them off one by one until I found the two that were in use. First, Cell Network Search was on indefinitely. I have a 3G iPad 2 but have not activated the 3g service. I found that either turning this Location Service off, or turning on the Cellular Data on would help it "find" whatever it was looking for. Since I have no need to have Cellular Data enabled, I chose to turn off this location service.

The Setting Time Zone I left on and set the time zone manually under General / Date & Time. Since I do not travel that often outside of my time zone I figured setting it manually would be fine. I think for the frequent traveller, this would be annoying.

It is frustrating to have something like this suddenly start draining my battery. Another nuisance I found with this IOS update is my screen does not automatically lock as it should. I do not have a smart case (by choice) and I constantly find it on as though something is keeping that function from engaging much like a process stops the screensaver from starting on your PC. I believe these issues are related. Whatever is searching for an updated location is also keeping the system from locking as it believes the pad is in use.

I realize this is not answer to your question "What is Cell Network Search", it's at least an attempt to address choices for disabling these services.

Thanks for your post. I found this thread very helpful.

I don't have all the links handy, but I found the information on the web at several Mac and cell phone tech news sites. Android and other phones also collect similar location based data and location based data is considered to worth billions of potential revenue for future marketing and targeted features (like traffic based navigation).

Go ahead and disable the compass calibration - your compass will still calibrate just fine. The traffic service sends location based information to Apple, and one rumored use of that data may be a future traffic based navigation service for the iPhone.

These are the optional services that collect location based information from your iPhone and send it to Apple for their use. This information used to be collected secretively, stored on you iPhone and periodically uploaded to Apple's servers. After all the uproar about that in the past, these are now opt-out services.

I disabled all of those settings in Location -> System Services the day I updated to iOS 5, and my iPhone and iPad have continued to work flawlessly, just as they did before. My compass still calibrates when needed, my maps and other traffic apps still get their information, and the cell phone radio still instantly connects to available towers as I move around. Traffic has nothing to do with using traffic based apps or services on your device and disabling it will not affect those apps or services one bit.

Those services have nothing to do with any feature, app, or function on your device. Your phone, nor any cell phone in history, needs a location based database to connect to cell towers. The radio simply detects the towers in range and handshakes with them to establish connection, and hands off to the next nearest tower when you move out of range of the current one.

Google a bit and you'll find lots of technical information about the various uses and proposed uses for location based data being collected by Apple, Google, and other cell phone makers. I'm not necessarily against the practice, and am glad that at least now Apple has at least made it transparent and given users the option to opt-out of these services since that was not possible to do so prior to iOS 5. However, these things must use some battery if on, and will transmit some data, just as the option to automatically send diagnostic&usage data does (although they seem to be programmed to use wifi, not cellular data, and may only dump their data to Apple when syncing as in the past).

As I say, just try it. Disable everything in that Location -> System services section and see if your device behaves in any way, shape or form differently from how it behaved with them on. Those settings have no effect on your device, your apps or how any device features work. They just quietly collect location based information for Apple's use (or potential future use - some of which may be very nice, like a real-time traffic based nav. service).