Originally Posted by georgeos

So I'm in the car and I noticed that it says if I turn on WiFi it will improve location accuracy even when not actually connected to a WiFi network ... how the heck does that work?
Here's a screen shot. Notice the bottom card.
Attachment 1453251

So yeah if anyone could tell me how this works, thanks


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i believe it means you don't need to be connected to the wifi network, but still needs 3G data connection for it to work.

so that works if there're wifi network within range, not so if there's none?

Originally Posted by ynight88

so that works if there're wifi network within range, not so if there's none?

Yes.

I had always wondered about this too. For some reason I had assumed it was inacurate and never trusted it.

Between the towers and my WiFi it's as accurate as the GPS... Puts me right at my house...

Originally Posted by SimonTS

Yes it does. It explains it perfectly and is quite correct. The Wi-Fi network is located by it's IP address, hence the phone can use that as additional location information.

the very foundation of your reasoning is brittle and fragile. IP addresses only know area, as in city. The only way to know an exact location associated with an IP would be if you were the ISP providing the service, and you knew what customers had what IP addresses and their physical addresses. I better revise this before someone takes it too literal. When I say area, as in city, I don't actually mean the accuracy is that much off, but like you even said, the accuracy is not remotely close to where your network actually is, so it still doesn't make sense. Regadless, again, not saying you're wrong, but what you said really didn't make sense. I'm checking out your link though, because I'm curious as to what the answer to this question is.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just you're reasoning on why it makes sense...well doesn't make sense.

Re: How does turning on WiFi improve location accuracy when not connected to a networ

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Rereading what I wrote, it appears I made a mistake when I wrote that. What I should have written was that the Wi-Fi signal gives a known location due to the SSID being transmitted.

If you read the other post with the link to ZDNet, you will see exactly why this is so. I also wrote about the inaccuracy of location by IP Address in a later post.

Originally Posted by SimonTS

You might want to have a read of this page on ZDNet - How Google--and everyone else--gets Wi-Fi location data

Interesting and useful info