Location Issue on my laptop with Windows 11

I’m not using edge secure network features. They are turned off but I’m still having the issue.

Thanks for this Rob, I had great hopes that syncing the time would resolve my issue, but apparently not. I too am stuck in Boydton, VA. Some browser work, some do not. Chrome puts me in the correct location, but Firefox and Edge put me in Boydton, VA. When I first go to the maps page it is fairly close to my actual location, but as soon as I click the centre location button, and allow location access, off we go to Boydton. It doesn't matter if I'm using Google maps or Bing maps, the result is the same. Only Chrome shows the correct location.

Out of curiosity I checked my ip location in at least half a dozen location services and every one of them put me in the correct location, except Where am I now? - My current location in real time (whereiam.net), which put me in, you guessed it, Boydton, VA.

John

John,

You must have posted this while I was writing my last very long post, but I just decided to review the thread to see whether my recent idea explains at least most of the posts.

As I reviewed the posts, I began to have some thoughts relating to why there are still so many apparently flaky results that your own post brings into better focus. It does appear that at least some of these people's devices or apps sometimes work properly, so that implies that Microsoft must have either found a way to pass the location information through their Secure Network VPN tunnel (maybe IPv6?) or there's some other additional settings involved in aggravating the problems further.

The Maps location button is apparently performing a different type of request than the initial startup state of the same app, so it's likely whatever Microsoft has done to compensate works with one set of requests and not always with some others.

You may also notice that in my recent post I mentioned the flakier issues I had with that same Where am I now? app and the fact that at least it was apparently using some Google backend services, which was evident when I broke it by selecting to 'block' rather than 'allow' the location requests and caused it to display URLs that contained a strange Google result that appeared to be an error of some sort.

The reason the various browsers likely display differing results is that only Edge is directly affected by at least some of those Secure Network features, while others might have varying results based on how they route their network traffic, either through or around those VPN or similar secure tunnels. For example, Chrome is known to use their own location services I mentioned in an early post, which use items like your local Wi-Fi or others that don't require them to resolve the IP address issues that affect Microsoft, or any others depending on the results Windows itself supplies to the apps running on top of it.

So, to simplify my thought process in this post, I suspect that Microsoft is trying to actually fix the VPN server location problem I've been discussing here by somehow passing another seemingly valid network identifier such as an IPv6 address through their tunnel, bypassing the incorrect, but really accurate server address of Boydton, VA and displaying the location of the actual client system instead. It's this tunneling 'trick' that's apparently not working in all situations and thus still providing what to most people looks like inaccurate location information, when in fact it's the trick itself that's fooling the far-end servers you're attaching to into believing that the requests are really coming directly from the client machines themselves.

I haven't seen any technical explanation for this yet, but it may actually exist, I simply haven't been trying to look for it. Now that I realize that some explanation must exist, I'll look around some more to see if I can find it, though I'm not in a hurry since what I've discussed already is enough to explain the original issue behind what's causing these location problems.

Rob

My experience is the opposite of yours. Again I’m not using any of edge’s secure networking features, the edge vpn is not on, I’m not blocking location information from any of the sites and it still thinks I’m in Boydton, VA.

Thanks for this Rob, I had great hopes that syncing the time would resolve my issue, but apparently not. I too am stuck in Boydton, VA. Some browser work, some do not. Chrome puts me in the correct location, but Firefox and Edge put me in Boydton, VA. When I first go to the maps page it is fairly close to my actual location, but as soon as I click the centre location button, and allow location access, off we go to Boydton. It doesn't matter if I'm using Google maps or Bing maps, the result is the same. Only Chrome shows the correct location.

Out of curiosity I checked my ip location in at least half a dozen location services and every one of them put me in the correct location, except Where am I now? - My current location in real time (whereiam.net), which put me in, you guessed it, Boydton, VA.

John

John,

You must have posted this while I was writing my last very long post, but I just decided to review the thread to see whether my recent idea explains at least most of the posts.

As I reviewed the posts, I began to have some thoughts relating to why there are still so many apparently flaky results that your own post brings into better focus. It does appear that at least some of these people's devices or apps sometimes work properly, so that implies that Microsoft must have either found a way to pass the location information through their Secure Network VPN tunnel (maybe IPv6?) or there's some other additional settings involved in aggravating the problems further.

The Maps location button is apparently performing a different type of request than the initial startup state of the same app, so it's likely whatever Microsoft has done to compensate works with one set of requests and not always with some others.

You may also notice that in my recent post I mentioned the flakier issues I had with that same Where am I now? app and the fact that at least it was apparently using some Google backend services, which was evident when I broke it by selecting to 'block' rather than 'allow' the location requests and caused it to display URLs that contained a strange Google result that appeared to be an error of some sort.

The reason the various browsers likely display differing results is that only Edge is directly affected by at least some of those Secure Network features, while others might have varying results based on how they route their network traffic, either through or around those VPN or similar secure tunnels. For example, Chrome is known to use their own location services I mentioned in an early post, which use items like your local Wi-Fi or others that don't require them to resolve the IP address issues that affect Microsoft, or any others depending on the results Windows itself supplies to the apps running on top of it.

So, to simplify my thought process in this post, I suspect that Microsoft is trying to actually fix the VPN server location problem I've been discussing here by somehow passing another seemingly valid network identifier such as an IPv6 address through their tunnel, bypassing the incorrect, but really accurate server address of Boydton, VA and displaying the location of the actual client system instead. It's this tunneling 'trick' that's apparently not working in all situations and thus still providing what to most people looks like inaccurate location information, when in fact it's the trick itself that's fooling the far-end servers you're attaching to into believing that the requests are really coming directly from the client machines themselves.

I haven't seen any technical explanation for this yet, but it may actually exist, I simply haven't been trying to look for it. Now that I realize that some explanation must exist, I'll look around some more to see if I can find it, though I'm not in a hurry since what I've discussed already is enough to explain the original issue behind what's causing these location problems.

Rob

My experience is the opposite of yours. Again I’m not using any of edge’s secure networking features, the edge vpn is not on, I’m not blocking location information from any of the sites and it still thinks I’m in Boydton, VA.

JB-D-M,

Can't say what your precise issue is then, since the Boydton, VA address detection clearly means that your traffic is exiting the Microsoft network from that facility, or at least appears to the particular destination website you're using to test as if that's where the traffic is being sourced.

Using that knowledge as an input, you need to try and determine what particular configuration on that specific PC might reroute your outbound traffic into the same sort of tunnel that Microsoft uses for those services. Maybe as I think about it some more, I'll come up with a possible reason for this odd behavior, but at present it simply makes no sense to me at all, since the Secure Network services are the only reason I personally know of that Windows itself routes your network traffic through their servers.

Since we're not sitting in front of your device it's not possible for us to review your settings and I'm really not interested in playing 20(,000) questions. You simply may have one of the other older problems that's been known to cause similar issues in the past, but the particular symptom seems to point directly at this relatively new issue for reasons I've already explained.

I will state that I had to make sure that my Site permission, location settings in the Edge browser weren't blocked in order to ensure the current info was being picked up by the testing websites, but typically these were indicating this failure rather than showing either Microsoft datacenter address, while the address info only became more accurate in my case as I removed any of the Cookie or other location related blocking, or disabled the Secure Network features in Edge or Windows.

< EDIT > Maybe try resetting your browser and/or deleting any history including Cookies if you haven't already done that, though I'm guessing you may have and that's really just grasping at straws, since it sounds like the browser settings aren't working properly if this won't appear to change for you. Corruption of certain settings or even the apps like Maps themselves was often part of the troubleshooting recommended for location problems in the past.

Rob

I have this same issue and it's super annoying. Edge, and the Maps app, in Windows 11, locates me in Boydton , VA, even though I'm in the Dallas, TX area. Chrome, however, does NOT have this issue, on the same system. Utterly ridiculous.

I had this exact same issue happen to me (and multiple other people have as well), all within the last two weeks. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with the ISP or any specific browsers. I think Windows location services are entirely failing for you and me, and the computer's default seems to be set to Boydton, since that's where the data center is.

I was able to band-aid the problem by going to Windows Settings -> Privacy & security -> Location, and changing the "Default location" setting via the "Set default" button.

This box should show up in the top-left corner with the Boydton address (I blocked out my own address which this is now set to). Click "Change" and enter your address, or alternatively you can click the "Choose location" thing under it and you can pick the exact spot you want the computer to think you are.

This allowed for everything I use to default to my address instead of defaulting to Boydton, hence "fixing" the issue since my PC isn't moving anywhere. This doesn't actually fix the issue with the location services that happened to people though, so if you bring your PC/laptop somewhere else and the issue still happens, you would have to do this again to match wherever you are.

Let me know if this doesn't work, since that would mean that the same issue appeared for multiple people at once but the band-aid solution doesn't work for every instance of it.