[wodenokoto]

I thought one of the selling points of 3g was gps like precision in dense urban areas where gps signals would bounce too much for precise location and therefore mobile carriers didn’t need to ask for gps.

With that being said, my 10th floor apartment has a 5g radio installed by one of the major carriers and I am still placed one block wrong when looking on Google Maps.

[Jolter]

I worked in telecoms back then, and I don’t recall 3G having any precise location mechanism. Most handsets back then did not have GPS receivers, and as such they could only tell you a pretty rough estimate of your position, based on multiteration from nearby cell towers. The best I could get was within a couple of hundred meters in an urban area.

4G (LTE) networks had more cell sites so could give better precision multilateration, but by then smartphones were taking over the market and they usually had GPS receivers.