Cellphone Tracking

[greggpb]

I am looking for a solution to track drivers in our company cars.

our company driver each have a company cellphone which we could use to track them..

Anyone know of a company that supplies this service or would I have to have a tracker installed in every car ?

Thanks

 

[quik]

What do you want to do, track the driver or the vehicle?

Vodacom has follow-me if you wanna check up on them from time to time, or if you want proper realtime tracking of your entire fleet something like C-Track might be better.

 

[Sackboy]

There are quite a few solutions on the market, mostly subscription services.

Maybe see if Look4Me is suitable. You could also get a smartphone and software and do it the simple/cheaper way.

Another option is to get one of those small trackers that can be hidden and which send an SMS with the position every so often or upon request.

 

[DotaGamer]

The problem with using the cell phone to track your drivers is that when they are not driving for you and are off the clock(not working), essentially u will still be able to track them on their cell phones...so is this not intruding on their right to privacy. Just a question

 

[SteveO]

unless the cellphone has a GPS device in it you will not be able to track them that accurately....well not very accurately at all.You can track them to the Base station they are attached to if they the phone doesnt have GPS, but if it has GPS you can track them to about 3m.

Best to get a tracking tool made for fleet management. This way you can keep track of your vehicles as well as being able to get updates as to the condition of the vehicle with some devices.

 

[Sackboy]

The problem with using the cell phone to track your drivers is that when they are not driving for you and are off the clock(not working), essentially u will still be able to track them on their cell phones...so is this not intruding on their right to privacy. Just a question

One of the cellphone networks had this problem when they caught some staff members attending strike rallies instead of working. I don't recall the whole story, but they tracked them on company-issued phones. The best solution would be to track the vehicle and not the person, unless it's built-in to the dash or something.

 

[greggpb]

just thought phones would be the cheaper option....

Phone's stay in the office outside of work hours... driver pick them up in them morning and return then at closing time..

Would rather use the phones as oppose to the vehicals.. becasue we have more vehicals than drivers... and tghey normally take what they need for the load but the are just dissapearing for hours..

but if vehicals is the only way then will look into something like that..

so is C-track the way to go.. ?

 

[cyberarmy]

I remember saw this cellphone locate/tracking service somewhere last week. It's definitely possible to use cellphone for realtime positioning (thought you have a degree of variance due to the use base-station triangulation than Satellite triangulation).

 

[KaasP]

LBS

Look4Me pricing looks thus:
R11.70 per month subscription.
R1.84 per search from your cellphone.
R1.08 per search from your internet.

A tracking solution based on LBS (Location based services) such as Look4Me has some downsides:
it's not very accurate
it's quite costly for anything other than sporadic adhoc lookups, recording historic information is not viable.
As far as I know the per lookup charged by the networks is around 50c, failed lookups where no position is available still get billed.

That said if you can't afford to install a GPS based system and adhoc is all you want it should work for you.

BTW, if you need to consolidate & limit GSM expenditure across your drivers based on a prepaid model, this is what we do (www.flickswitch.co.za). PM me your email if interested and I'll send you more info.

 

[Arthur]

I researched all this in considerable detail about 18 months ago. SkyTrax is a great vehicle tracking and monitoring system. Uses a GPS unit fitted to vehicle, with GPRS signalling. You can track the vehicle on a map from any browser. I have it fitted to all my cars, with hidden emergency panic button. Detailed or summary reports and history online or in PDF.

SkyTrax were acquired by Tracker a few months back. Some insurance companies will subsidise it wholly or completely.