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Location information based on Wireless Access Point

  • Artikkeli

Microsoft Lync 2010 is able to use the Wireless Access Point, a laptop is connected to, as the key to show your location. The client sends the so called Basic Service Set Identifier ( BSSID), which can be seen as an identifier for the wireless access point, to the Location Information Service (LIS) and it will return the location information for that wireless access point as it is defined in LIS.

However today I ran into the following situation. I used my Windows 7 laptop and was connected to wireless access point A. Lync was showing the correct location LocationA. I then put the laptop to sleep and went to another building far away from wireless access point A. I resumed the laptop and Lync was still showing my location as LocationA. This puzzled me, since there was no way that my laptop could still be connected to wireless access point A. Something was wrong.

I looked at the wireless configuration on the laptop using netsh wlan show interface and netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid. The interface command showed my laptop being connected to a BSSID, which didn’t appear in the list of BSSID’s my laptop could see (as listed by netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid) . Strange.

Turns out there is an issue in Windows 7 where it will report the wrong BSSID to applications after the laptop has been resumed. The issue is described in https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2385405 and there is a hotfix available. So Lync was being given the old BSSID and used that to get my location from LIS. It was doing the right thing, but it was based on stale information. I installed the hotfix and couldn’t repro the issue afterwards.

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