Wireless operators need to know about the devices on their network so that they can make assumptions about the sorts of content their customers are using and the amount of bandwidth they'll need. For example, if the carrier knows that the smartphones it has detected typically have large screens, it can conclude that those devices will probably be consuming a relatively large amount of content, which requires a lot of bandwidth.

Similarly, carriers can detect smaller, less expensive phones that don't run a real OS but do sport a full keyboard. The operator can deduce that these devices are specialized for , which doesn't demand a lot of bandwidth but does require a lot of signaling in the network. The updates and uploads that originate from these phones may be just a few kilobytes in size, but they are likely to be numerous, and each one requires a number of "signals" to route them through the network correctly.

To manage the radios that sit on the cell towers throughout their markets, wireless operators rely on a special set of software tools and hardware boxes. They use the equipment (which Alcatel, among others, sells) to tune the radios and their antennas to provide the best connectivity possible to the majority of devices served in the cell.

The boxes, which live at the edges of the network, gauge the right direction to point the radio antennas in and the appropriate amount of power to supply to the signals they send out. To do this well, the equipment must be able to tell what devices are connecting to a radio in a cell, and how far from the radio the mobile devices in the cell are connecting.

McDonald stresses that mobile operators don't use network intelligence equipment to determine various devices' physical locations on a map. Instead, they focus on the position of mobile devices relative to the cell tower.