Saturday, August 29, 2015

Resetting WiFi location reported by Google

Most people who have moved to a different location have faced an annoying problem. When they are connected to their WiFi router, their phone (or any device using Google's APIs through WiFi connection) reports that they are still at their old location.
When a brand new WiFi router comes online, Google associates it's physical location with it's MAC address. But when you move your router to a different location, Google's location API still reports that you are at old location.

To reset the location, simply append _nomap to your WiFi's SSID; the connection name.
For example, if your WiFi's SSID is MyHomeNet, then rename it to MyHomeNet_nomap

Google will then reset the cached information for that particular MAC address.