If you need more than country level data, these folks become very expensive very quickly.
Many providers are orders of magnitude cheaper. I run one of them - https://iplocate.io - but there are plenty of other high quality and affordable services.
Nyr · 1h ago
They are not the cheapest, but most often will be one of the most accurate thanks to their latency triangulation.
tallytarik · 39m ago
We and many others use the same techniques too. This is a concept introduced 20 years ago, and RIPE Atlas/IPmap has been a public implementation of this idea for the last decade or so.
(However, the vast majority of IPs can't be geolocated in this way, and there are caveats to those that can be.)
In any case, the difficulty with all providers in this space is how you prove accuracy at scale. If we assume some provider has some proprietary technique that nets 100% accuracy, that's great, but what do you compare it to? There is no ground truth data source - we are supposed to be that.
Marketing plays a big role, and admittedly, these guys have much better marketing on this point :)
Nyr · 21m ago
I have no doubt that other providers use latency from probes as a data point. But IPinfo allows way more weight from this in their calculations, probably because they have developed their own reliable network, unlike most competitors.
Your service, like many others, accepts as valid most intentionally fake geolocation data provided by networks. I am sure you know this anyway, so no need to mislead saying "we do the same".
tiffanyh · 1h ago
Just curious, what do companies typically use as the source for such data?
Many providers are orders of magnitude cheaper. I run one of them - https://iplocate.io - but there are plenty of other high quality and affordable services.
(However, the vast majority of IPs can't be geolocated in this way, and there are caveats to those that can be.)
In any case, the difficulty with all providers in this space is how you prove accuracy at scale. If we assume some provider has some proprietary technique that nets 100% accuracy, that's great, but what do you compare it to? There is no ground truth data source - we are supposed to be that.
Marketing plays a big role, and admittedly, these guys have much better marketing on this point :)
Your service, like many others, accepts as valid most intentionally fake geolocation data provided by networks. I am sure you know this anyway, so no need to mislead saying "we do the same".