I had read somewhere that the caller’s cell tower information is sent to the receiver of the call. Is it true because I can’t find any details regarding this online? If this is true why are there no apps to show this information on the receiver side of the call?
Edit: For this we can consider that the phone is rooted and the entire ROM is open source including the vendor RIL framework.
No its not.
If i had a penny for every time i'd been asked this question, or answered a similar question i'd be very rich by now :-)
You as a user, CAN get your devices cell tower info, showing which tower id your connected to, but the only people who know that same info of the person placing a call to you are the engineers in the network operations control room and that's only because they have access to the networks MSCs and BSCs allowing them to query for a subscribers IMSI.
Some operators do make this info available via an API or some kind of exclusive network access, but generally only if your a big corporate client who's likely to spend a lot of money with them, and give them a cut of the revenue generated from such access.
For the likes of most folks wanting to write simple apps to show the location of the person calling them, well it's very likely to never happen.
Seems I got a bit of flack from some sources about my abruptness on this answer originally, for those who are wondering I was a Senior Radio Access Networks Engineer for Orange UK for about 5 years, and routinely asisted law enforcment with queries regarding tracking calls, sms, and the location's of mobile handsets.
The amount of access that your engineers in the O&M department of your telco have is quite staggering, during my time in the job, I could at any time of day pull up any SMS, MMS or data packet sent across the company's networks, often without needing any kind of written permission.
I was able to do many things, including track your cell tower usage, but none of it was ever sent to the remote end of a connection, the originator was where that info stayed, well that and the internals of the network.
Now, that said, Iv'e been thinking about this question somewhat, and there is one way that it could be done, BUT... you would have to write your own calling application.
Essentially, what you would need to do, is write an app that intercepted both incoming calls and sms, and replaced the default outgoing calls app on the phone.
When a new call is made, once the number has dialed, you read the calling phones cell tower information, then build an SMS message with that info in.
Once the remote end answers (You can't do it while the phone's ringing as the signalling channel will be in use) send that SMS to the destination handset, and have the app that answered the call, tag that incoming message as belonging to that call.
Timing would be critical however, and it would be quite tricky to get right, with modern methods however, these days, it's kind of doable, but it's NOT an automatic thing.
