Sources of IP geolocation data
Initially, information about the IPs is kept in RIRs (Regional Internet Registry) whois databases such as the RIPE Whois Database and maintained by the organisation that owns the IP addresses, such as the ISPs.
COUNTRY attribute on the INETNUM and INET(6)NUM objects in the RIPE Whois Database:
There is no provision to define a more accurate location such as a city, knowing that the end user's location generally differs from the registered administrative contact location of an ISP, making the geolocation data's accuracy low.
The RIPE Database offers the "geoloc:" attribute on ORGANISATION and INET(6)NUM objects that may or may not be used as an additional source of information by these providers.
A number of companies provide geolocation services, including:
The RIPE Database offers the "geoloc:" attribute on ORGANISATION and INET(6)NUM objects that may or may not be used as an additional source of information by these providers.
A number of companies provide geolocation services, including:
Updating IP geolocation databases
We cannot guarantee desired geolocation for objects.
You should contact all providers above to ensure that your IP geolocation data is correct across the board. That makes perfect sense knowing that it is hard to tell which website uses which of these databases.
Most of your IP geolocation efforts should be centered around the IP geolocation databases as these databases are de facto the standard today.
An up-to-date entry in all the IP geolocation databases does not guarantee that your IP Address Space will be recognised appropriately everywhere. This happens because some content providers download the updates from the IP geolocation databases less frequently than others. If this happens to you, we advise contacting the specific content provider and asking them to download the IP geolocation updates.
Geofeeds
For the clients, we can add their resources to our Geofeed, which we public in RIPE Database.
Self-published IP Geolocation Data or simply a Goefeed, is an advanced topic. The first thing to mention is that the Geofeed is currently a draft and not an approved RFC. This fact, however, did not stop the internet community from embracing the concept. The first version of the draft was published in 2013, so it has been around for a while.
The Geofeed allows network operators to publish the IP geolocation for the IP blocks that are under their control. The feeds are published in the CSV format and contain the following information:
ip_range,country,region,city,postal_code
The idea is that the content providers will be able to process changes to your IP space geolocation automatically, based on the Geofeed that you publish, which saves you time on having to contact these providers individually to notify of any changes.
Unfortunately, currently, no standardised mechanism for advertising your feed to the rest of the world exists.
The Geofeeds are much easier to administer than the geoloc entries. The Geofeeds are just a flat file that can be edited at speed. At the same time, geoloc entries are troublesome to manage at scale (i.e., when you subdivide IP blocks that are then in use at different locations) as they require separate objects in the whois databases. (end of #geo)
