Comment by 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.