A distributed architecture provides the location of wireless transmitters to mobile devices for positioning, the location determined from at least one of crowdsourcing and wardriving. A server receives location data for wireless transmitters, such as an access point, a femtocell, Bluetooth Transmitter, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communication (NFC) station etc., from mobile devices. The server determines the locations of the wireless transmitters using the location data and provides the locations to the respective wireless transmitters. The wireless transmitters broadcast their identities and locations. Thus, a mobile device may receive the location directly from the wireless transmitter, eliminating the requirement of contacting a central server and downloading a regional almanac for positioning. This eliminates in a large number of scenarios the need to have data connectivity at the time of position calculation. Additionally, the wireless transmitters may transmit validation data to the server to validate or invalidate the determined location.