Patent ID: 8301171

Claim:
A method of finding a physical location of a mobile telephone at a given time, the method comprising: storing, in a subscriber database, data that are derived from, or are values of, mobile telephone control parameters associated with multiple mobile telephones on a network; storing, in a location parameters database, location data that associates different physical locations with data that are derived from, or are values of, mobile telephone control parameters, wherein at least some of the location data has been derived from a traffic monitoring system enabling points on a road network to be associated with values of some or all of the mobile telephone control parameters, and wherein at least some of the location data for an area extending beyond some or all roads in the road network has been derived through calculation or inference; interpreting the data in the subscriber database for the purpose of establishing the location of a mobile telephone at the given time by: using that data as a query that is run against the location parameters database in order to generate an answer that is the location of that mobile telephone, and doing so only when there is an explicit request to establish the location of that one specific mobile telephone and not as part of a sequence of package of requests in relation to each of the multiple mobile telephones.