Wifi location how does it work

Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors.

Fred Zahradnik. Freelance Contributor. Former Lifewire writer Fred Zahradnik has a long history as a writer and is considered an expert on all things related to GPS products and software. Updated on April 13, It's possible to do Wi-Fi geolocation without an Internet connection, but to do that, you'd have to cache a copy of the database, which might be too big. If law enforcement gets ahold of your phone, they could possibly look at what areas your phone has cached as evidence of where your phone was on what date within the last few days.

For websites, there's a web browser standard geolocation API. OSes and web browsers that offer these APIs usually ensure that the user must be prompted for permission before an app or website is allowed to use the API to determine where you are.

Because any website or web ad server you connect to can see which IP address your HTTP request came from, they can use this to get an idea of what city you're probably in, without using the web browser geolocation API, thus without you being prompted to give permission. They can use several methods, the most common on smartphones is cell towers. You can also use the GPS that is built into the smartphone but most phones allow the user to turn that feature on or off.

On a laptop you will most likely get location data based upon your IP address. A wifi hotspot may or may not be a known location but the gateway that you use to connect to the internet will under almost all circumstances be a known location. A fair amount of wardriving no link as I am behind a corp proxy has been done over the years and a lot of wifi hotspots, commercial and residential, have been mapped and that data is publicly available.

I can't confirm but I would bet that Google Maps has a done a fair amount of this and may use the data to some extent. When you say how does wifi determine the location, what is actually happening is the outward facing router the wifi is connected to will have a known location to the ISP and thus ads, local news, websites, can get this information and show targeted or location specific data to the user.

The IP that goes out from there can be used to at least narrow things down to your ISP and with some heavy traffic analysis the location may be able to be narrowed done but that is hit or miss and it deep magic in most cases.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. WiFi location tracking is fairly straightforward as far as RTLS goes: A WiFi-based tag sends a beacon message that is received by multiple access points.

These access points are time synchronized, so they can time-stamp the message when they receive it. The time stamps are then sent to the location server and the software translates the time stamp and access point data into a location. If you need to track capital equipment in a healthcare setting, or materials in a manufacturing plant, WiFi could be a great solution.

Below are five factors that can help determine whether WiFi is the right fit, or if you should look at an alternative RTLS technology.

They are also typically larger in size and far less power-efficient than their alternatives. If you want to deploy a WiFi positioning system, you have to be certain your WiFi infrastructure is dense enough to support it.

A WiFi location tracking system should give you a level of accuracy ranging from three to five meters. To do this, it uses time difference of arrival TDOA measurements with wide bandwidth.