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.
I’m not super sure about the specifics but having taken a 5G class, the professor made it quite clear that due to the latency and bandwidth requirements of 5G, precise tracking is required to allow towers to correctly do beam forming.
When talking about the 5G system, cell towers can request a users estimated velocity which when combined with the towers own location combined with the physical radio (that is communicating with the phone (UE)) you can get a pretty good position estimation.
What is new is that network providers are trying to sell this tower/5G data to other companies.
I could be wrong but from my understanding 5G has always required precise tracking of every device connected.
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.