Has this ever happened to you?

Has your cell phone ever given you a wrong current location?

My cell phone (HTC Thunderbolt) has always been a little off on my current location, usually by a couple miles. The reason why is a keep the "standalone GPS" switched off, so the phone uses the network for my location.

I mostly see my typical wrong location in a weather app (WeatherBug). And since the wrong location is just a few miles away, no problem. However... On Sunday night I noticed the location was waaayyyyy off, by about 10 miles. Since then my phone's location has really traveled. And some of the locations are not accessible by just anybody. It has been showing a couple of "current locations" around the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (wrong locations also show in Google Maps)

After my phone's location took a magical mystery tour this morning, I called Verizon to ask if my account was showing any anomalies. Nope, nothing wrong. When I listed the locations it was showing, the tech lady responded "oh wow". Basically I was told inorder for it to list the correct location I would need to turn on the GPS. And the conversation ended with a free new phone offer.

So!

Has this ever happened to anyone else? And/or... Is it normal for a phone's network location to travel around?

And just for reference, this is the location that freaks me out a little bit:


That puts 'my location' on the doorstep of the MRF. (Talked about toward the end of this wired.com article.)

Could make you a little harder to find in a round-up, though. Maybe it's a good thing?

I've never had any luck with the GPS radio in smartphones. Either they never pick up my location, or it's way off like you described.

If your phone has a SIM card, you could try replacing it. Sometimes that will fix the GPS. Probably not though. Most likely the radio is bad.

It's probably just a bad unit though. Shoddy manufacturing all around these days. Can't even get a pair of pliers worth a damn at the hardware store anymore.

4G!!!! Oh we can only dream of that in the UK lol We have it, but its shockingly bad.

My phone shows my location as 15 miles away, the weather apps pick up weather from the same location.
I think mine is because i once used GPS on my phone, and it uses that location as my current location, i havent had the gps on since then.

reply to post by AmberLeaf

My 4G is pretty bad also, I'm on the border of the coverage so it's slow and drops out to 3G often.

I'm totally baffled by what is happening. Started on Sunday and so far today it has shown me at over 6 locations even though I haven't left my house. I could almost understand if I had visited these locations at some point, but a few I can't visit because they are behind security checkpoints.

It's just odd.

Last year during a NATO conference in the northern states of the US, where I was in the southern states of the US, my phone acted quirky. I typed in "Target" looking for a local store I knew was minutes away, and it should have given me a dot in Texas but my phone thought the closest store was in Chicago, hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Then I immediately thought someone was cloning my phone and the wires got crossed.

Around the same time, I typed up a sushi restaurant nearby and got a location in San Francisco, thousands of miles away.

One day driving home at night in a rural place where there were no streetlights and no way to find north so I had to use the GPS map, I typed my location and it came to a house a county away, same name as me, same address street name as me. Then I thought, someone must be stealing my ID; that night I considered going to the address and confronting the person of my name in the daytime, seeing if they'd say yes to using my ID details or if I recognized them from somewhere. It must have been a glitch in the cell phone tower logics.

reply to post by Sandalphon

That is weird!

I was worried about cloning also, that's one of the reasons I called the carrier this morning.

I hope my current issue is a tower mixup, it's just odd it is using towers father away then needed. I can see one of my network's towers from my house.

I think it's normal for phones especially smart phones to do this. Especially when you use it to check locations. When you check for location again, it will update.