IP geolocation technology has been around for a long time. It is the only non-intrusive tool a service provider can use to assess the geographic location of online visitors.
IP geolocation has established itself as the premier mechanism for providing content localization, digital rights management, customer targeting, and fraud detection services.
But how accurate is IP geolocation? Can we trust her to make important business decisions?
The accuracy of IP geolocation has been a hotly debated topic over the years on many platforms. We can find many complaints on the forums, for example, that IP addresses do not show the correct location or that only country-level data are valid.
One of the most popular myths is that IP geolocation is imprecise because it is based on publicly available data and usually points to the location of an organization's headquarters, not the location of a real user.
The results are very different because not all IP geolocation services are the same and often use different technologies to retrieve and process data. Please check out our blog post here to learn more about how traditional IP geolocation services work.
It is not the purpose of this article to compare different IP geolocation providers. But it will be soon, stay tuned!
This article walks through the basics of IP geolocation and then explains the best accuracy and results that we can theoretically expect from “ideal” IP geolocation. It then describes the conceptual limitations that we need to be aware of and to what extent we can trust the data we receive.
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When we talk about IP geolocation, we are primarily looking at the IPv4 address space, since most of our web traffic still comes from IPv4 addresses.
IPv6 was created to address the global shortage of IPv4 address space by providing a colossal expansion of 2,128 addresses. However, this did not happen, although two decades have passed since its introduction.
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Various supporting information such as zone of confidence, network type and risk factors can make IP geolocation based on business solutions very reliable and trustworthy.