Yeah, it is a fairly large dataset depending on the tower location. For example, in an inner city locale you may have hundreds of devices on a single passenger train going past a local tower. These transient handsets used to cause a massive issue with drop outs and loss of signal as they would acquire and then drop service from a given tower. Nowadays we have solutions for this which centre around shaped beams along the direction of travel with communication between towers to ignore handsets which are moving along a travel corridor.

To make that clearer, imagine the overhead train line has passengers moving along and under the train line people are walking on the street. The various towers which are along the train line will pass information about which handsets are moving and which are local so the local towers can handle local handsets and specific towers above can handle the train customers. This keeps the lower towers from changing their directionality and dropping calls and data confections, but also allows the train handsets to have reasonable connection to the network.

Another interesting case is what used to happen at the edge of the range for a tower. The whole tower could modulate its power so it could reach a far off handset if nobody else was around, extending the effective range. This unfortunately meant that if someone came closer to the tower it would have to lower its power to not harm the handset and the person far away would lose signal.

Nowadays the power level can be handled per handset. Each handset gets a small portion of a second, actually a small handful of parts of a second, and the power of the tower is adjusted to reach them at their required level for their time slots. If someone comes online close to the tower you may have competition for the time of the tower and thus lower speeds but the power will still match your handset independently of the rest. Very cool technology, way better than what it was with GSM, and also much more secure.