911 Product guy here...

TL;DR, this is nothing new.

Carriers have offered location of your device for 911 calls for years now, through a set of metadata called Automatic Location Identification (ALI).

This is only provided to 911 (police & fire) by carriers alongside your 911 call.

Mobile Device Manufacturers can also provide "precise location" to 911 for the same calls, but that's a separate form of data and closely secured.

Bottom line - Carrier data has always been less precise, but more readily available. Device data (i.e. Apple and Google) is more precise, but harder to access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_911

But it seems this article is arguing is that there is another (non SMS based) way of accessing the precise location data which is not so difficult to access.