Patent ID: 8462751

Claim:
A geolocation utilization manager apparatus for managing wireless local area networks (WLANs), the geolocation utilization manager apparatus comprising: a utilization aggregator configured to aggregate channel utilization information from the WLANs, each supporting wireless communications between a wireless access point (WAP) node and associated station nodes on a selected one of a plurality of communication channels across an available spectrum; a geolocator configured to determine either relative or actual locations for each WLAN from the channel utilization information; a utilization mapper which uses the channel utilization information from the utilization aggregator and the locations from the geolocator to identify at least two neighboring WLANs which exhibit overlapping signal coverage with one another on at least two discrete communication channels each having available airtime; and a remapper configured to consolidate channel usage to a single communication channel shared between the at least two neighboring WLANs, thereby increasing airtime usage of the single shared communication channel and freeing up others of the plurality of communication channels for use by remaining ones of the neighboring WLANs.