The "Use wireless networks" function has nothing at all to do with wifi. It works using cell tower locations. The wireless provider knows the coordinates of all its towers, and therefore knows where you are (within a certain non-impressive degree of accuracy) based on what tower you are connected to.
On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Skip <[email protected]> wrote: > > I posted this early this morning and I still haven't seen it, so if it > shows up twice, my apologies. Feel free to delete this one. > > Does anyone think the wifi based location determination actually > works? I guess I imagine that it would work like this. In the office > where I work, there are a couple of wireless networks. And once I go > inside the building with my phone,the GPS quality goes to crap since > it is indoors--no surprise there. It can literally be off by BLOCKS, > perhaps a half mile or more after I've been inside for a while. I > would like to think that the phone would somehow know that, OK, I > don't have a decent GPS signal, so let's see if I can get a decent > wifi location. Sure, it's not going to tell me what room in the > building I am in, which GPS would be able to do if there wasn't a roof > on the building, but I am OK with that. I just want locale to know > what building I am in. So now I have to make circles of about a half > mile in radius (a mile in diameter) to be sure my location in locale > doesn't look like I've left and gone to the default profile since the > GPS accuracy decreases once you go inside a building and it starts > looking like you are hopping all over the place. > > So, where does the Wifi database live? How can I test it to see how > accurate it is--both in terms of feet and inches and in terms of > completeness of the database? Can I add new wifi access points to the > database? How can I see, for instance, if my home access point is in > the database? What happens if I move and take my access point with me? > How do I update the database? > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
