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ntruby's avatar
ntruby
Copper Contributor
Jun 24, 2026

Location wrong on laptops, correct on Android

I live in England, postcode TA4 3JF.

Google maps, what3words etc on my Android, when connected to my home broadband, correctly identifies the location.

All 3 laptops in the house, 2 mine, 1 my wife's, give a location SA11 5LR, some 115 miles away.

I had thought it was the ISP but I recently changed ISP, indeed technologies, moving from wired Sky to satellite Starlink, and it hasn't changed.

The problem:

  • Persists across multiple browsers
  • Chrome location-internals shows kPlatformOnly, High Accuracy
  • VPN and Windows default location setting make no difference

Could anyone suggest how I can get this fixed please?

Thanks

N

Features

2 Replies

  • Felixsyu's avatar
    Felixsyu
    Iron Contributor
    Jun 25, 2026

    When GPS isn't available (which is the case for most laptops), Windows determines your location by looking up the unique hardware addresses (BSSIDs) of nearby Wi-Fi networks in a Microsoft-maintained geolocation database.

  • Owen_official's avatar
    Owen_official
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 25, 2026

    Your phone is right because it has GPS , but laptops don't, so Windows falls back Microsoft's WiFi-location service. That looks up your router's MAC address (BSSID) in a crowd-sourced database, andyours is wrongly registered in SA11 5LR. That's why nothing you tried worked, the ISP swap, VPN and browser changes don't touch the BSSID lookup at all.

    Quick Proof: tether a laptop to your phone's hotspot and check again, If the location correct itself, it's definitely your home router. The fiz is renaming WiFi and adding  nomap to the end of the SSID, which tells the database to drop the bad entry and re-register from the accurate reports your phones are already sending. Did you keep your old router when you switched to Starlink? If so that exactly why the problem followed you across.