Forum Discussion
Wrong Location
This is very annoying. I live in western Montana, yet when I'm online, websites show I'm in Seattle, Washington, more than 500 miles away and in a different time zone. Surely someone in T-Mobile's IT department is smart enough to fix this.
ibdiver wrote:
This is very annoying. I live in western Montana, yet when I'm online, websites show I'm in Seattle, Washington, more than 500 miles away and in a different time zone. Surely someone in T-Mobile's IT department is smart enough to fix this.
Welcome to the world of cellular internet. The location reported is for your IP address which is the established at the facility where TM aggregates all cellular signals and ultimately connects to the internet. You can't control that. It may even change from time-to-time. The best you can do is use applications that don't care about it, or allow you to establish a physical location (Like YouTube TV). Some VPNs may also allow you to do that.
I have the same problem. I live in Fresno, CA and geolocation services report my IP address as in Sacramento, CA 150 miles away. This means that my TV app (Sling) will not give me the one local Fresno channel it would ordinarily give me.
I think TM is using DHCP to hand out IP addresses and the pool of addresses is shared between Sacramento and Fresno but mostly Sacramento (once of twice it gave me an address which was geolocated to Fresno).
The problem is that this a 3-way fight between TM, Sling and the geolocation services. Even if I could get Sling (or any similar app which uses IP geolocaton) to say I was in Fresno, it would only last until TM assigned me a new IP. The geolocation services can't fix this because the IP sometimes is in Sacramento and sometimes in Fresno.
The best solution would be for TM to split the IP address pool into two pools one for Sacramento and one for Fresno and tell the geolocation services about this.
I understand the why of it. The purpose of my post was in hopes of inspiring some of the techies at T-Mobile to come up with a work-around. I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice.
ibdiver wrote:
This is very annoying. I live in western Montana, yet when I'm online, websites show I'm in Seattle, Washington, more than 500 miles away and in a different time zone. Surely someone in T-Mobile's IT department is smart enough to fix this.
Welcome to the world of cellular internet. The location reported is for your IP address which is the established at the facility where TM aggregates all cellular signals and ultimately connects to the internet. You can't control that. It may even change from time-to-time. The best you can do is use applications that don't care about it, or allow you to establish a physical location (Like YouTube TV). Some VPNs may also allow you to do that.
