I like it, It's refreshing. I've been too cooped up with tunnel vision.
I was referring more to switched networks, such as pinging it's 3G/4G IP rather than going into the nitty-gritties of everything.
that wasnt the nitty gritty of it
, but im going to get into some of it just because i feel its pertinent. So to start with some reference in case you want it:
https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/park/cs422-datalink_wireless-2-11f.pdfbasically pre GPS in every phone, changing your carrier signal to a new tower was mostly done off of doppler effect(the fading/strengthening of a signal) relative to the towers, the cell towers are using your carrier signal(if in a call) or your own carrier pings to towers(i honestly forget how often these happen while not in use, but its googlable) that it sends to figure out which tower to have you on, because of the coverage and how these towers communicate they know within a relatively small distance where you are based upon triangulation from multiple towers, the concept is almost in its entirety based upon huff duff/ HF/DF detection developed in WW2. Now however though with the introduction of GPS in even a "burner" phone this changes some, though i should note that GPS in a phone is quite often different from say maritime GPS, as the phone itself is not communicating with a satellite for location data, but that the phone is sending its data to a cell tower, that is using its own triangulation+our geo satellites to give your exact position. So even now the cell towers triangulation plays a role in determining your location. In an area with low coverage(that the towers cant triangulate) it will try to base your location off of the speed you were moving at that it could last calculate.
Anyway by OP's post "i saw it in a movie" most movies are referring to pinging a phone off of triangulation/gps not from say its wireless connectivity to a network. Though they still often get much wrong, the terminology is still spot on in this case. Well at least it will be once they get past all those firewalls.
@OP - few last thoughts on getting the info from your network. Depending on where you live their may be local laws that say your provider has to give you location data if you ask, or the provider may have its own internal rules to do so or not, so google would be your best bet on that. See if any local laws exist or if your provider will give that info out to customers. If no to both you could still try some social engineering to see if that gets you what you need.
