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Maxmind Geo Script on cell phones - known issue or just me? (9)

01-15-2013 08:14 AM #1 okthen (Member)
Maxmind Geo Script on cell phones - known issue or just me?

So I have the Maxmind Geo Script PHP extension installed on my server and it works fine when viewed on a computer.

The one weird quirk I've seen that may or may not be limited to me is if someone were to visit my page on their cellphone and they're connected via Wi-Fi, the geoscript works fine, where it shows the city and state properly.

However from my tests, if a cellphone views the page NOT connected via Wi-Fi, meaning it's just through their mobile data plan through their cell service provider, then nothing shows up for the geo info. Granted, I haven't tested every cell carrier yet but from what I've seen, this seems to be the case.

Is this a known issue? And is there a known work-around to this?

Or maybe this really shouldn't be the case and somehow my setup isn't configured the right way?

Any info about this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

01-15-2013 08:56 AM #2 zeno (Administrator)

The Maxmind database isn't purposed for mobile geodetection, as far as I know there currently are no accurate databases for mobile geo-detection. If connected by WiFi it doesn't matter that they're on a mobile device since their IP is that of the serving device.

I'm not sure how people deal with geodetection for mobile devices other than country based on carrier info.

01-15-2013 09:55 AM #3 deondup (Member)

Anything that's IP based won't work - or will be very inaccurate.

There is a GPS solution but it requires the user to have it activated on their phone. It's incredibly accurate and can add some nice things to a landing page

01-15-2013 04:03 PM #4 theking (AMC Alumnus)

most of the people activate the gps in mobile for making check-ins to fb or foursquare etc. so yes you need to go gps way to detect the location.

01-16-2013 01:12 AM #5 bside (Member)

If you view your IP via your phone when your connected through a carrier, you will notice most of the time, your located in another state. GPS is one of the only ways but it clears out a lot of the bulk traffic out there if your lander relies on geo'ed data.

01-16-2013 04:01 AM #6 okthen (Member)

Okay, guess I can't rely on the geoscript for mobile then.

Thanks for the responses everyone.

01-16-2013 04:09 AM #7 sandyone (Member)

Imagine if a web pages php could locate a cell users location.

That would be worth more than can be made in PPC.

01-16-2013 08:40 PM #8 okthen (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by deondup View Post
Anything that's IP based won't work - or will be very inaccurate.

There is a GPS solution but it requires the user to have it activated on their phone. It's incredibly accurate and can add some nice things to a landing page
What is this GPS solution and how do you implement on your webpage? Is there a link somewhere about this?

01-17-2013 03:23 PM #9 caurmen (Administrator)

okthen - If you're looking at Android phones only, http://developer.android.com/guide/t...ion/index.html . If you want to do iPhones, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...ps-coordinates has a Javascript snippet.

There's also some interesting stuff on tracking location by cell tower at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8...ion-using-gprs .

None of this stuff is terribly friendly right now, though - all the above links are fairly hardcore techie. (The stackoverflow URL may be a giveaway.) I've not done mobile location detection myself, but if people are interested, this is the kind of thing I could put in the queue for a future tutorial. Let me know if so.

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