years generally wi fi based positioning is based on wireless access points the intensity of the received signal and a method of fingerprinting the fingerprinting generally involves an information gathering process that records the service set identifier ssid media access control mac address and the physical location of the access points this fingerprinting is done over a long period of time for an extremely large number of access points each access point 39 s information is then recorded and stored in a database which can then be indexed and searched so that matches can be determined thus allowing a device to know its location based on the previously known physical location of the access points however in order to build a reliable database of network access points an immense amount of data gathering is required because of how large of an undertaking this is only a handful of organizations have up to date reliable databases this enables these few organizations to charge a premium for their service currently devices can geo locate themselves using these third party services e g from google or microsoft the devices may provide beacon data to the third party service and in return receive a location that was previously triangulated by the third party service these third party services can be costly for each query which quickly builds up cost over time in many circumstances a user may be visiting the same small set of locations repeatedly thus a solution is needed to solve the problem of a device requiring multiple geo location queries for the same location and driving up costs for devices that require geo location but do not have satellite capabilities the traditional solution is to triangulate a position from the beacon information this requires an exhaustive database of the positions of.