Question

I have been reading the W3C Geolocation API specification and I was wondering if anyone has found any information on how accurate the location returned is.

I found the accuracy attribute:

The accuracy attribute denotes the accuracy level of the latitude and
longitude coordinates. It is specified in meters and must be supported
by all implementations. The value of the accuracy attribute must be a
non-negative real number.

But I’m wondering if anyone is aware of a possible range for these values? Is there a maximum number of meters that will be returned?

Any application I wrote that used this would be used in a relatively small geographic area, does the accuracy depend on where that area is?

Note:

I found a similar question, but it does not talk about the accuracy range and I believe they are talking about using Google’s GeoLocation service.

Answer 1

Based on experience the accuracy on device without GPS, like laptop that only relies on Wifi mapping, is 100-200 meters in urbanized area. With GPS, like in mobile phone browser its as goods as it gets, 10-30 meters.