Re: IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)

["Paul G" <paul () rusko us>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "william(at)elan.net" <william () elan net>
To: "Jim McBurnett" <jim () tgasolutions com>
Cc: <nanog () merit edu>
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 2:55 PM
Subject: RE: IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)


> On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Jim McBurnett wrote:
>
> > I'm sure that this made it here before but:
> >
> > www.analysespider.com/ip2country/ip_country.html
>
> Commercial service when there are several free ones available....
>
> BTW - based on what I can see they are not updating data once per day but
> only once/month. Also having some experience in this matter I highly doubt
> that its much more accurate then what I got - it appears no matter what
> path you take to get the data, it would to a degree be wrong (difference
> being which part is wrong). One possible way to resolve some issues could
> be to have testing servers placed in several locations and analyze TTL for
> connections to various ips to determine how far its from several servers -
> of course it would also not be accurate as ip networks are not necessarily
> interconnecting in the same region (CAIDA did their best with this method
> some time ago but have not kept updated data as far as I know).

the most accurate systems i am aware of use online purchase statistical data
to increase accuracy. someone purchases a blue widget online, from a certain
ip address and with a credit card with a certain billing zip code, and
voila - they now have an idea of where that ip might be. of course, this
works best (only?) for residential ip addresses in broadband-enabled
neighbourhoods, but it's pretty darn good at telling me where i am (within
5-10 miles).

-p