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Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

Now I understand the "your location accuracy is improved when turning on WiFi" message! Very interesting.

Does this also mean that location accuracy is NOT improved when no Internet is available and iOS couldn't update its list of known access points around me? This would mean I could save battery while traveling by disabling wifi.

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If you're traveling to somewhere you've never been before, and you have no internet for 100% of the time, then maybe wifi won't be useful. But if you've been there before, the device may still have info about wifi hotspots stored locally (after locationgate I'm not sure how long those are kept, and whether policies were changed again after ubiquitous FDE), which would allow it to still benefit from having wifi turned on even without internet.

Right. But would still be interesting how "far" away the hotspots are downloaded. If I e.g. roadtrip from New York to Chicago with Internet in New York - I wonder how far Wifi Assisted GPS would help me before there isn't any meaningful data anymore.

At the time of the location gate I had parsed my personal buffer and I found out that pretty much all Manhattan was included. I hadn't a roaming plan when visiting New-York so I only got randomly access to internet at free hotspots.

So I guess a good rule of thumb would be to turn off while on the road with no wifi, but keep on in cities (where A-GPS is the most efficient) where you gonna stay for awhile with sporadic hotspot access.

Also classical GPS (while slow to kick-in) is often really good enough in countryside where you don't suffer from building shapes interfering with the signal.

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