Edit: Was informed my GPS does not actually think I am far away, something else is causing that.
(See edit above) Ive heard it’s GPS, but my phone always thinks I am in a city hundreds of miles away for some reason so just wondering more specifically how that would work?
In: Technology
The cellular networks, as part of their core functionality, always know which cell towers your phone is connected to. They already need to know this in order to route incoming notifications to your phone – there’s way too many active phones in even a small town to attempt to send alerts for every phone in the town from every tower, much less bigger areas.
The 911 routing systems exclusively use this information to know which dispatch center to send you to, because that information is always known to the system before you even dial a number. This was set up long before GPS in phones was even a thing, and continues to work fine.
After a decent number of phone had GPS, an additional system was set up to support routing GPS information from phones that had it to dispatch centers that could process that information. When it all works properly, this gives them faster and more accurate information about your location than you could have given them verbally. If it doesn’t work right for any reason, you’re still talking to the local dispatch and they can get your real location verbally. And they have common sense, so can figure it out if your GPS erroneously things you’re at another location far away. This is still just an add-on though, and the call routing method is still cell network based on tower location.
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