The company has spent the past few years driving a fleet of 200 trucks up and down the streets of 2,500 cities and towns across the United States and Canada. These trucks scan for the pulse given off at least once a second by every home wireless router or commercial hotspot, recording the unique identifying code for that piece of Wi-Fi equipment. That code is correlated with the exact physical location where it was captured using GPS in the trucks, which cruise the streets at 15 to 50 miles per hour as they collect this information.
The resulting database consists of 16 million Wi-Fi access points covering an area where Skyhook says 70 percent of the U.S. population lives and six Canadian markets where the majority of that nation's people live.
Interessant ist dabei, dass keine Verbindung mit den verschiedenen WLAN-Netzwerken aufgenommen wird, sondern nur die sekündlich von jedem Acess Point ausgestrahlten Beacons registriert und mit Geo-Koordinaten versehen werden. Die Firma Skyhook Wireless behauptet auf ihrer Website, über die weltweit grösste Datenbank von geocodierten Acess-Points zu verfügen. Das mag stimmen, aber bisher enthält die Datenbank ausschliesslich Access Points aus den USA.
