Network-Assisted GPS

Overview
Network-Assisted GPS (also referred to as A-GPS) is a hybrid approach used to overcome certain limitations in GPS technology: namely, that GPS usually only works outside buildings, may take several minutes to determine location, and uses more battery power than other location determination methods.

By using GPS in conjunction with any of the previously described methods of collecting location data, the assisting technology can report an approximate location to the application or service while GPS works to obtain a more precise location. For instance, operating system and application developers may use crowd-sourced positioning databases to provide approximate locations to their users until GPS signals are successfully triangulated. The precision of A-GPS in these circumstances depends on the accuracy of the assisting method.