[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.