Hi Keith,

We don’t use what3words, but we are working with a similar idea.

Ericsson will use Plus Codes, an open source standard that allows us to assign a single brief code to any place on earth.  There are free tools to do the conversion from lat/long, including a Google sheets add-on.  The level of proximity depends upon how many characters we choose to use. So, that means, if we have two sites within close proximity to each other, if we use less characters in the plus codes, we can have both sites have the same “locality”.

References:

https://plus.codes/

Wiki

Convert to Plus Code (Open Location Code) using Google Spreadsheet Addon:

https://plus.codes/spreadsheet-add-on

Google supplied tools to convert using programming languages:

https://github.com/google/open-location-code

And they are now included in Google maps: