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How about this headline: "Your iPhone is caching cell tower coordinates for faster location lookups". Is that sensationalist? Or, does it represent the most l

• iang 16y ago
  It's a long time since I worked on mobile phones but in GSM the phone has to keep an internal of the tower it's connected to and the nearest neighbours in order to manage handover smoothly (ie. With dropping calls). I suspect 3G is similar. In GSM the phone also had to know the distances to each tower +/-500m in order to adjust the timings for communication with the tower. (It's 8 years since I did is stuff so memory might be off on the numbers a bit :-)
• Mafana0 16y ago
  It doesn't. GSM system, or any other similar standard, is based on the idea to frequently search for the most convenient cells in the immediate vicinity to connect to. How can the phone know that the stored location, of a previous cell is good enough to connect to next time you are nearby again? It hasn't stored your location while you were connected to the cell at the first place. How would the phone know that there's no closer, better cell to connect to next time you're near that stored cell? The OP's rationalization doesn't make much sense, IMHO.