An empirical investigation of the accuracy of location-based services in South Africa

This article describes an empirical investigation of factors influencing the accuracy of location-based services (LBS) on GSM phones in South Africa. The experimental settings were three distinct environments in Johannesburg, South Africa. The results indicated that some parameters such as geographical location and environment of an LBS request have a significantly high impact on the accuracy of LBS. In addition, there was also a huge difference between the predicted and provided accuracies by mobile location providers. This article concludes with a discussion of solutions on bridging the gap between the predicted and provided accuracies to LBS users with the view of improving LBS user dependability on the service provided.