Help! Phyical location of router?!

[briantatai]

The issue is as follows, My brother, who lives in Ohio, gave me his router (I live in Michigan). I have everything hooked up and running, however, the physical address of the router is somehow still programed for Ohio. My cell phone (HTC HD2) has a weather application on it, and when I am in my house (Bloomfield, Michigan) and connection to the router via wifi, it says on my phone that I am currently in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I need to know how to fix the address that the router is sending out, to my current physical location. Thanks.

[fordem]

There is no way to set the physical address of a router - consult the provider of the weather application.

[briantatai]

Thanks for the quick reply! It has to do with the router, if I switch wifi off on my phone, and just use the phone's 3g connection, the weather goes back to the proper city (the city I am in), as soon as I connect to the router over wifi, it goes back to Ohio. It is the strangest thing!

[jmizoguchi]

Similar thread exist here. You have to dig hard. Good luck

[fordem]

Originally Posted by briantatai

Thanks for the quick reply! It has to do with the router, if I switch wifi off on my phone, and just use the phone's 3g connection, the weather goes back to the proper city (the city I am in), as soon as I connect to the router over wifi, it goes back to Ohio. It is the strangest thing!

I'm not disagreeing with you in any way - I'm simply stating a fact - there is no way to set the physical address of a router.

Whatever technology the application is using to determine the location of the client is where the problem lies, hence my suggestion to contact the application provider.

Let me give you an example ...

There is a company called Skyhook that maintains a database of wireless router MAC addresses, cross referenced to the geographic locations they were in.

I'm not going to discuss how they acquire the information - simply what they do with it, and why their concept may be seriously flawed - and I want you to note, that if your application uses this companies technology, that is purely co-incidental.

At some date & time in the past, when your brother had this router in Ohio, this company records the MAC address of his router, along with the geographical co-ordinates where it was observed - a year later, you have the router, in a new location, but whatever system they use to acquire the data is not active where you are, so their database contains incorrect and out of date information.

Your phone - connected to the router, now reports the MAC address of the router it is connected to, and the application sends this data to determine it's location, and the old, out of date geographic location information is returned.

The problem does not lie with the router or it's MAC address - but with the out of date information in the application provider's data source - you can't change anything in the router's settings to make it return the correct geographic location, but the application provider, who knows what system they use to determine the location of the phone, should know how to deal with the problem.