GeoIP location

GeoIP TLDR

"GeoIP", "geolocation" or "geo ip location" are terms that cover the same principle: Getting a real world geographic location for a specific IP address.

IP addresses are fluid in the sense that they can belong anywhere on earth. There are no geographical or physical restrictions on IP addresses.

But there is still value in being able to determine where an IP address physically belongs. And that is the purpose geoip services fulfill.

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Samples

Try out these, if you would like to give it a go, and see how it works:

Geo-location of iamroot.tech Geo-location of microsoft.com

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Usecases

GeoIP is useful for, for example

• Forwarding the user to the nearest server if you have several servers in play on several continents. This can be done both via the website itself, or at DNS level.
• Restrict access to websites (or parts of them - e.g. video) due to license rights.
• To present content that is geographically adapted to the user's physical position (e.g. weather forecasts, news - or simply using the right language towards the user).
• Can be used as a parameter in fraud prevention - does it make sense, for example, that European IP addresses buy goods in local US online stores?

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Accuracy of geoip lookups

Since IP addresses are not dictated by any physical location, and their physical affiliation can change from hour to hour, there is also a certain degree of uncertainty associated with geoip location. GeoIP postings must therefore be taken with reservations - and as an educated guess.

There are no exact statistics, but as a rule of thumb you can say that:

• The country location is 99% accurate
• Regional locations are 80% accurate
• City locations are 50% accurate

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How to map IP address physical locations

There are many inputs in this process. Sources for each single assessment can originate from

• ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers - they stand for the global IP allocation to organizations and businesses)
• ISPs (Internet Service Providers)

Because there is a lot of competition among providers of GeoIP services, they are also secretive about how they arrive at the location of an IP address, so it is difficult to come up with any definitive explanation.

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Providers of GeoIP services

For now, iamroot.tech has integrated the GeoLite2 database from MaxMind. It's a free, but not that accurate, database. MaxMind also offers paid databases and API access with a higher degree of precision.

Other possible providers:

• IP2location
• ipinfo.io
• DB-IP
• IPregistry.co
• IPGeolocation.io
• IPapi.co
• IP API
• ipdata.co