5G significantly increases granularity by a metric shit ton, and if they were continually pinging in the same area, eventually you end up with roughly one zone.
[1] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach
[2] https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/cell-tower-lease-news/...
[1] Give it a few minutes and it'll pin point where my desk is inside my office.
It does some real dark arts physics wizardry to compute a position. Nothing like that can be done for cell phone signals.
LOL
The only substantial difference is that in case of GPS the calculation happens on the receiver side (GPS signals only go in one direction), while cellular service providers calculate time advance on the tower side.
Maybe there is an element of triangulation in that, but it's far less precise and ambitious than GPS.
Once you know which tower the phone is connected to, coordinates of that tower, antenna pattern, and distance (from timing advance and speed of light), you can calculate approximate cell phone location.
You get more data if the phone moves or propagation changes and phone changes towers. In urban environment with many towers location obtained this way can be very precise. Not as good as GPS, but good enough to within a block.
This is a simplification. Real systems also use signal strength, take into account multipath propagation, and apply some filtering from physical constraints (how fast a cell phone can move).
Your link is for GSM and states a 550 meter resolution, but I tried looking up LTE and I think it said 10 meters there.
I also understand modern (maybe next generation) towers will use directional transmission to avoid sending signals in all directions. Even if that's a 20° beam, that narrows don't the location by a lot.
You need to lock with multiple satellites, I assumed this was for triangulation.
But the math is not significantly harder. The only meaningful quirk is that without a perfect clock you don't know the exact distances to each satellite, instead you have distances a+n, b+n, c+n, etc. Still though, you're just looking for the spot where your numbers line up. There's no wizardry in the "compute a position" part of GPS.
In the end the math is indeed similar, but how it gets there is quite different.
For one thing, each satellite carries an atomic clock to make things work. And the receiver locates itself by listening to signals, while triangulation is several receivers working together to locate a transmitter.
Lower cost prepaid carriers are also pushing 5G phones heavily (albeit somewhat crappy ones), and offering them for free.