FAQ : Misc. : What about geolocation? How does a content provider where my endpoint is?
What about geolocation? How does a content provider where my endpoint is?SixXS serves a lot of users from all around the world. As we have a limited number of PoPs we do not cover every country where our users are located individually. A tunnel endpoint on the user side might thus be in country A while the PoP is located in country B and the address space is allocated on the ISP level (/32 or above) in country C. Most content-providers will thus guess the wrong country C as they only look at registry data. The Easynet PoPs are a good example of this as they are registered in the UK, but have PoPs in Germany and Belgium. Thus if a content-provider tries to determine the geolocation of the user there can be a lot of ambiguities unless they ask the user for the address. I am a user, my content-provider mismatches where I am locatedPlease contact your content-provider and point them at this FAQ and convince them to start using our geofeeds as described below. I am a user, I want to be seen coming from another country!We only publish truthful details and like our strict signup system we do not stray from this. We are a content-provider, how can we determine where an IP address is located?SixXS publishes the registered user's name and optionally address in WHOIS. Unfortunately WHOIS does not scale for querying prefixes and thus the location of endpoints. Also WHOIS contains unstructured address data SixXS publishes Geolocation details of our tunnels and the related subnets using the Self-published IP Geolocation Data specification. We publish both the IPv4 address of the endpoint and the IPv6 address(es) of the endpoint tunnel along with any subnets that are routed over that tunnel. We do not aggregate the results thus revealing the individual locations separately.
As a content provider you can regularly (every 24 hours) retrieve:
HTTPS is required for accessing the geofeeds URL. If your organisation wants to appear in the below list please send a note to our contact address. Note that whois.sixxs.net returns the same details along with name and optionally address. Our WHOIS server, like that of many other providers (eg the RIRs), are rate-limited though and are not suitable for determining geolocation. Who uses the GeoFeeds?We know for a fact that at least the following content-providers are using our feed. Alternative methods for geolocationPlease note that even if a content provider uses our geofeeds, they might use alternative methods for determining your location. Amongst these might be browser-language settings, cookies, signins to social networking sites, or (shipping) addresses you have registered with them or their partners. As such, in case of a mismatch, please check that your details are correct in the geofeed and otherwise contact the content-provider to ask for details on why they mis-geolocate you. |