My wifi ipad shows the wrong physical location when connected at home.

Exactly.

Mine shows my location as a half block away (my neighbor's router).

C&P from my previous post:

I live in house #7. My home is never identified as the location. Usually, house #1 (100 yards down the street) is given as the location as my neighbor there always has his router powered. However, when my neighbor across the street in either #6 or #8 powers up his router, my location changes to whichever one is powered. If both are powered, it picks #6.

russfromfairhill wrote:

Why does the ipad report Germany (the same spot every time) as its location. This ipad has never been to Germany and neither has the router (unless it was manufactured there). If the crowd-sourced database doesn't know, wouldn't it report that "location can't be identified"?

And why wouldn't the Apple people just tell me that instead of sending me to Linksys/Cisco?

Without people signing on at my house with iphones, will this ever correct itself?

I don't think that the Apple people know how it works.

This ipad has never been to Germany and neither has the router.

Any chance that a neighbor's router has been there?

Any match between a detected nearby wi-fi hotspot and Apple's database could presumably be used to locate the iPad, not just the hotspot that you are currently connected to.

I don't see an "Ignore this network" setting on my own first-generation iPad, just a "Forget this network" for networks that I've connected to in the past, and a general on/off switch for "Ask to Join Networks." I doubt whether changing these settings would make any difference to Location Services because they deal with connecting to networks rather than just "detecting" them, but feel free to try changing the settings.

My understanding is that every wi-fi access point broadcasts a unique identifier code (MAC address) that can be detected just by "listening", without attempting to connect to its network. No transmitted data is intercepted. An iPhone brought into your home would presumably not have to actually connect to your router in order to report its location to Apple; it would just have to "detect" its MAC address, along with those of other nearby access points.

Please keep in mind that all of the above is really just conjecture on my part. This is not a technical area that I'm really familiar with, and I also don't know definitely whether a wifi iPad's Location Services uses the iPhone crowd-sourced database.

I just found a good public source of information about Apple's crowd-sourced database - the May 10, 2011 Senate subcommittee testimony of Guy Tribble, Apple's Vice President for Software Technology. It can be downloaded as a pdf file here:

http://judiciary.senate.gov/pdf/11-5-10%20Tribble%20Testimony.pdf

The contents include:

To enable Apple mobile devices to respond quickly (or at all, in the case of non-GPS equipped devices or when GPS is not available, such as indoors or in basements) to a customer’s request for current location information, Apple maintains a secure database containing information regarding known locations of cell towers and Wi-Fi access points – also referred to as Wi-Fi hotspots. As described in greater detail below, Apple collects from millions of Apple devices anonymous location information for cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. From this anonymous information, Apple has been able, over time, to calculate the known locations of many millions of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers. Because the basis for this location information is the “crowd” of Apple devices, Apple refers to this as its “crowd-sourced” database.

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Collections and Transmissions from Apple Mobile Devices

Apple collects anonymous location information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers from millions of devices to develop and refine Apple’s database of crowd-sourced location information. The mobile devices intermittently collect information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers they can “see” and tag that information with the device’s current GPS coordinates, i.e. the devices “geo-tag” hotspots and towers.

This collected Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower information is temporarily saved in a separate table in the local cache; thereafter, that data is extracted from the database, encrypted, and transmitted – anonymously – to Apple over a Wi-Fi connection every twelve hours (or later if the device does not have Wi-Fi access at that time). Apple’s servers use this information to re- calculate and update the known locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers stored in its crowd-sourced database. Apple cannot identify the source of this information, and Apple collects and uses this information only to develop and improve the Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower location information in Apple’s crowd-sourced database. After the device attempts to upload this information to Apple, even if the attempt fails, the information is deleted from the local cache database on the device. In versions of iOS 4.1 or later, moreover, the device will not attempt to collect or upload this anonymous information to Apple unless Location Services is on and the customer has explicitly consented to at least one application’s request to use location information.

If you do want to try using someone's iPhone to update Apple's database of your router's location and the location of immediate neighborhood hotspots, the iPhone will need to simultaneously detect both the local wi-fi signals and also GPS satellite signals. So instead of bringing the iPhone indoors, bring it just outside your home and turn on its Maps app. Hopefully it will be able to detect your router's wi-fi signal (and possibly your neighbors' wifi signals) at the same time that its Maps app is providing the iPhone's location via GPS. The iPhone doesn't have to actually connect to your network. Keep it just outside your home for a while if possible.

This may very well not work - your problem might still be something wrong within your iPad itself, or the database update might fail. However if you can get access to an iPhone, it can't hurt to try. If it does work, it might take a few days before the database gets updated.

I haven't seen an answer to how geolocation searches work on Apple products. I have a Macbook Pro running Lion OS X and when I use Chrome and Firefox at home it correctly specifies my address (within a couple of houses at least). When I use Safari 5.1 it constantly thinks I am at my work address which is 30 miles from my home. If I go to my other office location (in Boston) it still reports the other work location.

I haven't tried to see what it would report if I were in some other WiFi location yet. I have been

using http://browsergeolocation.com to check the location that is being reported.

Again, this works fine on other browsers just not Safari. I'll keep looking around to see how Apple supports the geolocation feature in their browser.

I have the same probelm. I can't find any answeres to why it says that my iPad to is in China. I have a Linksys 2500 router. What's wierd is that my location services used to work but that's no longer the case. About a month ago my location changed for no apparent reason. I reset my router, the iPad, i'm now running ios 5. Still it's the same problem. I just can't figure it out.

I have fairly the same problem, but my iPad simply does not get my location. I reset my data and everything in correspondence with apple and they told me it must be a hardware issue. As soon as I went to the service centre and connected to their wifi, it got my location. The same happened in a mall. But at home, it fails. I have no clue what I should do. If anyone can help?

The problem with the iphone suggestion is that no one in my close circle owns an iphone. Also, there is no wifi network in the neighbourhood.

Also, there is no wifi network in the neighbourhood.

If your iPad is not a 3G model, then that is presumably the problem. Wifi-only iPads do not have a GPS or cellular signal detector, and the only way they can find their location is by detecting nearby wi-fi networks whose location has been entered into Apple's online database. The networks don't have to be public - they are never actually accessed, just "detected", and so they can be nearby private wireless routers.

See

iOS 4: Understanding Location Services

Actually, I have a wifi network at my home, and i found another way to create a wifi connection so that there are two wifi connections available in my house. Still my iPad doesn't give me location.

Yes. My iPad is simply wifi.

Yes, but Apple's database apparently doesn't know about your wi-fi networks.. My earlier post in this thread quoted Guy Tribble, an Apple Vice-President as follows:

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To enable Apple mobile devices to respond quickly (or at all, in the case of non-GPS equipped devices or when GPS is not available, such as indoors or in basements) to a customer’s request for current location information, Apple maintains a secure database containing information regarding known locations of cell towers and Wi-Fi access points – also referred to as Wi-Fi hotspots. As described in greater detail below, Apple collects from millions of Apple devices anonymous location information for cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. From this anonymous information, Apple has been able, over time, to calculate the known locations of many millions of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers. Because the basis for this location information is the “crowd” of Apple devices, Apple refers to this as its “crowd-sourced” database.

.

Apple collects anonymous location information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers from millions of devices to develop and refine Apple’s database of crowd-sourced location information. The mobile devices intermittently collect information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers they can “see” and tag that information with the device’s current GPS coordinates, i.e. the devices “geo-tag” hotspots and towers.

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I don't know of any way to "manually" update that database. At some point there apparently needs to have been a GPS-equippped iOS device in your neighborhood to geo-tag the detected wi-fi hot spots and send their location to Apple. That's why I had suggested bringing an iPhone, perhaps belonging to a friend, right outside your house and then turing on its Map app in the hope that it would later send the location of your wi-fi network to Apple's database. It doesn't have to actually access the wi-fi networks to do this, just "detect" them. I have no idea if this would work.