A recent news report mentioned that a "cell tower" moved along with participants in a demonstration (in London IIRC), and also that it switched networks, so obviously someone noticed that.
Time division logic involves keeping track of how far each phone is from the tower. I think GSM uses 50m or 100m bands, ie. phones that are 200m from the tower time their broadcast bursts so as not to conflict with phones that are 100m from the tower. I don't know whether the distance information is available to the phones, or is kept internally in the tower, though. (I'm not an expert on this, I just heard that this need paid for a fair amount of NTP research/development, many years ago.)
The parameter in GSM is called "Timing Advance". [http://www.qtc.jp/3GPP/Specs/GSM_GERAN/0510-8c0.pdf] and it's the length of time by which the mobile advances its transmission to the base station. So with increasing "timing advance", the mobile has to start transmitting earlier.
Units are GSM symbol periods, defined to be 48/13 µs = 3.69µs, which, multiplied by the speed of light (3⋅10^8 m/s) is 1108m. As the distance contributes in both ways (from base-station to handset, and back) one timing advance step is half the distance: about 550m.
The base station measures the relative phase of received transmissions from the mobile and will send information to the mobile to set or adjust the timing advance. [look for "timing advance" in http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gts/04/0408/05.03.00_60/gsm... which specifies the information elements that are exchanged.] So, yes, it should be possible to get TA for each cell the mobile exchanges data with from the phone.
A recent news report mentioned that a "cell tower" moved along with participants in a demonstration (in London IIRC), and also that it switched networks, so obviously someone noticed that.
Time division logic involves keeping track of how far each phone is from the tower. I think GSM uses 50m or 100m bands, ie. phones that are 200m from the tower time their broadcast bursts so as not to conflict with phones that are 100m from the tower. I don't know whether the distance information is available to the phones, or is kept internally in the tower, though. (I'm not an expert on this, I just heard that this need paid for a fair amount of NTP research/development, many years ago.)