[wisplike]

My knowledge on this is the tower should be able to optimise beams without location information. Channel information can be relayed back to the tower for beam optimisation. The tower needs to know the signal path characteristics but not explicitly the location.

Not disputing that location data is used for beam optimisation just that I dont believe it is required.

[gregoryw3]

Exactly, the channel information is all that’s required but you can quite easily get the location information from that, which makes it easier to add additional features from a system point of view.

If I recall correctly, the tower will report channel information to the higher up controller system which will then decide which next tower should be notified of a phone that’s entering its range.

So while explicit positioning isn’t required when dealing with one tower, the system overall does need to determine a users position and velocity to handle tower to tower transfers.

In other words my opinion is that the difference between a towers channel information and a users position is almost one and the same. It’s a handful of math equations away.