I'm not in San Antonio

[boomerang]

I'm about 50 miles NW of Detroit.

I don't know what happened. For about half an hour my S7 thought I was 1300 miles away in San Antonio. I've been changing router settings and running Speedtest on my phone as well as my laptop and suddenly Speedtest thought my closest server was in San Antonio.

I thought it was kinda weird, but then I went back to my home screen to find that the weather widget thought I was in SA and so did Google maps.

Then, it got it all figured out and everything is back to normal. In between time I was changing settings, restarting the phone, etc.

Weird. :\

 

[Kartajan]

it wanted to hang w/ me...

 

[boomerang]

Maybe so because it thinks it back in SA this morning. Some huge update wanted to install and I'm allowing it so we'll see what happens after the 23 minutes it says it's going to take.

Hmm, nobody else has experienced this... This may be bad.

 

[ControlD]

Maybe so because it thinks it back in SA this morning. Some huge update wanted to install and I'm allowing it so we'll see what happens after the 23 minutes it says it's going to take.

Hmm, nobody else has experienced this... This may be bad.

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but my Note 2 used to always tell me I was in Burt, Michigan whenever I was at home (NW Ohio). It was frustrating because my weather, news, etc. were all focused on that area.

Even today, every so often my phone (now a Nexus 6) switches over to me being in Burt but it never seems to last very long. It is funny to look at my Google Maps history and see all the trips I have made to the fabled city of Burt when in fact I have never been there.

 

[boomerang]

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but my Note 2 used to always tell me I was in Burt, Michigan whenever I was at home (NW Ohio). It was frustrating because my weather, news, etc. were all focused on that area.

Even today, every so often my phone (now a Nexus 6) switches over to me being in Burt but it never seems to last very long. It is funny to look at my Google Maps history and see all the trips I have made to the fabled city of Burt when in fact I have never been there.

It sounds like the same thing just that my phone has a more ambitious travel agenda.

Now, it's back thinking it is where it actually is but the update, which was security related I don't think was what triggered it. It took a few minutes after the install to figure out where it was.

I've had my modem, on a restart for instance to swap out a router, pick up an IP address from another part of the country for a brief while and I thought maybe that might be it initially but the WAN IP I had was one assigned to right here in this area and to top it off, my wife's S7 has no location issues.

I'm really hoping this is just a glitch and not a true problem with the phone.

 

[ControlD]

Out of curiosity, does this only happen when you are on WiFi, or does it also happen with a pure cellular connection?

It seemed like for me it was usually when I was connected to my home WiFi. I have had a couple of times when I was on a cell connection that my phone briefly gave me the wrong location, but that was only for an instant. When I was connected to my home WiFi I went for months of being shown at the wrong location. My wife has also had some instances of her location showing as Burt as well, but again only briefly.

I think it is a Google issue more than a phone problem. I'm not sure how location services work over WiFi, but something there gets saved as a wrong location and it can take a long time for that to get sorted. Just a guess on my part though.

 

[cbrunny]

Samsung device? Not surprised. My Note 4 has atrocious GPS. Unusably bad and extremely unreliable.

 

[boomerang]

Out of curiosity, does this only happen when you are on WiFi, or does it also happen with a pure cellular connection?

It seemed like for me it was usually when I was connected to my home WiFi. I have had a couple of times when I was on a cell connection that my phone briefly gave me the wrong location, but that was only for an instant. When I was connected to my home WiFi I went for months of being shown at the wrong location. My wife has also had some instances of her location showing as Burt as well, but again only briefly.

I think it is a Google issue more than a phone problem. I'm not sure how location services work over WiFi, but something there gets saved as a wrong location and it can take a long time for that to get sorted. Just a guess on my part though.

I've only been at home on WiFi since I first experienced it last evening. I will be out and about a bit today and will keep an eye on it.

I have a sneaking suspicion it's Google related also. On my PC, if I open up Maps in Google my location typically is spot on with my residence and now it's more generalized. My location shows up as near the town I live in but not my street and my home. I think they're having some issues but why it is not affecting my wife's phone is a mystery.

 

[gorcorps]

I've had several instances lately where the maps app thought I was near the east coast, and took quite some time to find me. I'm on a nexus 6p so I doubt it's specific to your hardware.

 

[ControlD]

I've only been at home on WiFi since I first experienced it last evening. I will be out and about a bit today and will keep an eye on it.

I have a sneaking suspicion it's Google related also. On my PC, if I open up Maps in Google my location typically is spot on with my residence and now it's more generalized. My location shows up as near the town I live in but not my street and my home. I think they're having some issues but why it is not affecting my wife's phone is a mystery.

I had the exact same thing. I was using a Note 2, my wife was using a S3/S5. My phone constantly showed the wrong location and her phone was almost always correct.

I don't think it was an issue of Samsung having poor GPS functionality to address a post above. In fact, if I would turn off WiFi and get my location from the phone GPS my location would be correct. Somehow it had something to do with location services over WiFi. And, somehow it is related to a particular phone. I would love to figure out what was going on because it drove me nuts.

 

[Raduque]

It's definitely some sort of IP-based location service issue. My weather widget always shows the correct city for me, but sometimes websites that use LBS to determine your location show me California, Arkansas, Louisiana and several different cities in Texas.

 

[JeffMD]

If it lost internet access from the wifi, the phone would use its 4g data connection to calculate location, but the location calculation is still based on internet servers, NOT cell phone towers. Your data is routed through many proxy servers before it reaches something that is on the internet. Depending on congestion and routing protocols by your mobile provider, the server your 4g connection dumps out onto the net could be several states away.

 

[Dulanic]

I've had it happen a handful of times and it is almost always IP/Wifi related. We went to a 4th of July fest last year and it thought I was 500 miles away, all I could figure is the carnival there had some WiFi and it used that to identify where I was. Don't even need to connect to the wifi for it to try and figure it out.

It's a great battery saving perc vs GPS, but yeah setting it to use GPS only is always more accurate.