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[Bowdon]

I'm on BT OR 500 FTTP.

I recently got a login attempt of a new device on my ebay account. I had recently visited ebay so I knew it was me. But I was being nosey and went back into ebay and checked the login addresses. I was surprised that the address of the current connection I was on was Camden, London. I live around Manchester.

Is this a normal route? I would have thought I'd have had an ip location of Manchester, or some other nearby location.

[XGS_Is_On]

Yes, perfectly normal. The way BT and many others hand out address doesn't have to relate to geography. If they're using PPPoE the IP address can come from anywhere.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Indeed, my Zen IP shows as Barnet and I'm in Sheffield.

I believe only Virgin have specifically regional IPs due to how their network routing works with IP addresses regionally assigned (I believe the public routed Internet is closer to the customer, so can literally take the quickest route to your neighbours rather than going to London and back, great for peer to peer networking).

As most ISPs backhaul to London, the IPs tend to be registered as around that area as that is the point its connected to the public Internet and that IP address could have been assigned to anyone at that ISP across the country.

I consider this a good thing, it means websites can't trace back to where you are physically located from the IP alone.

[bogof]

Indeed, my Zen IP shows as Barnet and I'm in Sheffield.

I believe only Virgin have specifically regional IPs due to how their network routing works with IP addresses regionally assigned (I believe the public routed Internet is closer to the customer, so can literally take the quickest route to your neighbours rather than going to London and back, great for peer to peer networking).

As most ISPs backhaul to London, the IPs tend to be registered as around that area as that is the point its connected to the public Internet and that IP address could have been assigned to anyone at that ISP across the country.

I consider this a good thing, it means websites can't trace back to where you are physically located from the IP alone.

Many websites use 3rd party services, such as GeoIP, for lookup of IP to location.
If you have a static IP and want it to reflect a closer geographic match the you can submit a database correction request to GeoIP.

It probably makes most sense for performance reasons though for the location to match wherever your ISP connects your PPPoE session to the Interwebs, as otherwise you can incur a penalty on sites like Speedtest.net, that does use GeoIP for some of their server selection algorithm.

[Alex Atkin UK]

That's a good point as to why GeoIP should reflect the nearest route to a CDN basically.  Would be curious to see if Virgin are optimal, I'm not sure if their GeoIP actually reflects the regional nature or not, I just know their DNS tends to show your local node.

[XGS_Is_On]

My static is geographic but not registered here. VM routing is definitely not optimal.

[craigski]

Why would you use inaccurate geo location for speedtest? Surely a better option would be to use routing tables to find 'closest' server on the network?

If Ookla are using geo location for their data harvesting of speedtests, I would question the quality of their resold data.

[XGS_Is_On]

Why would you use inaccurate geo location for speedtest? Surely a better option would be to use routing tables to find 'closest' server on the network?

If Ookla are using geo location for their data harvesting of speedtests, I would question the quality of their resold data.

I can't speak for the servers and ISP you may use but I don't have my ISP's router tables and neither do Ookla.

[craigski]

I can't speak for the servers and ISP you may use but I don't have my ISP's router tables and neither do Ookla.

I guess that was my point. If you (we) dont have access, and nor does the speedtest service, then the accuracy of finding the closest server will be limited based on inaccurate geo location.

If you take a look at cloudflare methodology:

https://speed.cloudflare.com/about/

By leveraging the anycast network, the closest data center is found by network routing based off of BGP. This is a more accurate way of finding the closest data center than traditional methods, such as geo-location based off of your IP address.

A different approach than Ookla?

[XGS_Is_On]

Absolutely. Cloudflare own both the network and the speed test servers. Ookla servers as you know ISPs pay for them and host them on their networks: they're just an application running on a server.

I can't really see how you could reach the closest Ookla server in terms of routing without participation from Ookla and all the ISPs to make it that way. I guess it works well enough for them.

It's not like it's a big issue in the UK. The country is small enough that there's no excuse for not seeing line rate anywhere on the mainland at very least.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I think Ookla is heavily weighted on ping times.

[kitz]

I've had the same IP for many years and there has been various guesses Ive seen for my location.  Mostly Sheffield, but also seen locations practically all around the UK, somewhere in Devon frequently popups.

The following geo-locators currently have me down as being located in

ip2location   Newcastle upon Tyne
ipinfo       Amesbury, Wilts
DB-IP      Colindale, London
ipregistry   Gloucester
IPGeolocation   Sheffield
IPapi      Chesterfield
ipbase      Sheffield
criminalip   Sheffield   

I think the closest any of them have ever been is when I was doing some testing for something and had a dynamic IP allocated near to the MSAN.  The dynamic IP I was allocated had obviously previously been owned by someone in the next town who wasnt bothered about hiding their location.

If I use the ookla tester I tend to get the "Allow speedtest to access your location" popup.  I bet there's a lot of mobile devices and laptops who automatically share without thinking.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Unfortunately there are also sites like https://wigle.net/ that if you have WiFi there's not a lot you can do about it.

[kitz]

Unfortunately there are also sites like https://wigle.net/ that if you have WiFi there's not a lot you can do about it.

Hmmmmm.  So anyone submits info and you get guys roaming around recording them.  Load up Netsumbler and go do some war driving getting 100's of IPs.

I do wonder how and if that encroaches GDPR rules.   If you have an IP and an exact location then that surely would be personal identifying information.... especially if they are recorded without your permission.   

I see you can request deletion from the database.

If you want a record removed from the database, please include the BSSID (Mac Address) of the network in question!

I have concerns about their database security..  their database of forum members and active stumblers appears to have been compromised, yet I cant see that has caused them much concern.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'm not convinced Google aren't already doing this if you leave Location enabled in Android though.  They did initially create a location database based on streetview doing exactly this, though they got into trouble for that.

It used to be Android could get your rough location using this, if GPS was turned off.  Not sure if this was locked down later on given its a privacy issue.  But I believe its how web browsers get your location on laptops too.  Will have to check on a laptop as https://mylocation.org/ seems to test this functionality, turning WiFi on didn't seem to make a difference on my Linux box.