Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC address

Re:Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC... by seiji on Tuesday September 09, 2008 @10:59PM (#300037)

Skyhook knows where your access point is because at one time they drove by and mapped it. Google is probably collecting the same information from their street view vans. All you need is a laptop with a GPS receiver to log coordinates and MAC addresses.

So why not do it yourself? http://wigle.net/ is a public access point MAC address mapping site run by community contributions of location information.

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Re:Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC... by coderrr on Tuesday September 09, 2008 @11:10PM (#300043)

I looked through the wiggle database. A TON of their information is super old. Of course there's no way to know how old SkyHook's is since it's totally private.

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Re:Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC... by seiji on Tuesday September 09, 2008 @11:31PM (#300057)

Skyhook loves to tell you how recent their data is. They re-drive high turnover areas (colleges) a few times a year. Everything else is quite recent. With Skyhook's high profile use in the iPhone they can't afford to be out of date.

Last I checked they had over 45 million access points recorded. With enough users, the system can become self sustaining. You upload all the detected access points in your area for a request so it's trivial for them to auto-update their system if you submitted a newly discovered or changed MAC address.

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Re:Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC... by forgeman on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @12:19AM (#300093)

Thanks for the wiggle.net link... I've got a place to put my wardriving data now! :)

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