Around May of this year, reports began to appear on Russian resources that GPS began to work poorly on smartphones – mobile devices had difficulty catching satellites, and the location was not always accurate. Users sinned on updates and tried to solve the problem by rolling back to previous firmware versions, someone reset the GPS settings, others tried various applications. However, none of this helped. It turned out that all the “affected” smartphones on Qualcomm chipsets, and they all live in the territory of the Russian Federation.
To determine the location by satellite systems, the device must acquire signals from at least four satellites. Moreover, the gadget knows in advance their exact position. There are such concepts as ephemerides and almanacs. The first means the exact position of the satellite for the next few hours, and the second is the approximate position of all satellites in the constellation for the coming weeks. Devices without the Internet receive this data only from satellites. This is called a cold start, which usually lasts a few minutes. If the gadget is connected to the Internet, this process takes significantly less time. In this case, the smartphone can determine the approximate location thanks to the towers of mobile operators or Wi-Fi points. It’s called A-GPS.
The user of the resource “Habr” conducted an experiment and tried to figure out why the location began to occur with a very long delay. It turned out that there are no almanacs that primarily transmit data for GPS, that is, A-GPS does not work. Smartphones try to get files with information for A-GPS from domains that belong to Qualcomm and Broadcom, but in response they receive an access error. According to other sources, a similar problem affects devices based on MediaTek chips. When using VPN on the router, A-GPS works fine.
Source: Trash Box
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