What data sources do you utilise for your IP Geolocation?

Many leading IP Geolocation providers likely rely heavily on reverse DNS data to gather location details. An IP address may have a textual record, but this isn't always so. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) might use these records, often including airport city codes, for mostly internal tracking. These can give clues to the potential location of network routes and subnets. But the accuracy of this information is often suspect; it's typically manually entered by ISP staff and can be prone to mistakes or become outdated.

Digital Envoy, Inc originally developed this approach, involving significant manual processing. It's safeguarded by a US patent (6,757,740) granted in 2004.

At BigDataCloud, we believe that reverse DNS data just doesn't cut it. So we ignore any DNS-related information. Instead, we've designed a superior, precise, robust, and automated method to determine the geographical areas serviced by network routers, without needing help from network operators. We're close to receiving our first patent for this innovation.

Our IP Geolocation technique relies solely on the following:

• WhoIs registry data
• BGP global routing information
• A Self-Published IP Geolocation Feed (Geofeed) in line with RFC8805
• Evidence from the field
• And most importantly, our bespoke network infrastructure Big Data crawlers.

However, we're still refining our approach for the IPv6 address space. Some location information specific to IPv6 addresses and IPv6 only might include point coordinates from GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, which is accessible from their website, MaxMind.