![geo maxmind geo maxmind](https://www.vmray.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Response-Maxmind-Geo-located-Malware.png)
You may imagine that when you sign up for internet service, your ISP assigns you an IP address, and this IP address is your gateway to the internet until you move, or switch ISPs. The phrase “your IP address” might lead you to believe that the IP address being located is really yours in the same way that a street address is yours. There are tools to find your IP address all over the web, including on our website. While it is possible to map some IP addresses to street addresses, one of the major constraints on the accuracy of IP geolocation has to do with the infrastructure of the internet itself and the nature of IP addresses. Will we be able to improve GeoIP data so that, one day, we can locate street addresses? Do we already have a method to produce that kind of data, but withhold it for legal and ethical reasons? If you start with the premise of finding an end-user’s location, you might wonder why we repeat this disclaimer so often.
![geo maxmind geo maxmind](https://addons.prestashop.com/1327497-pbig/geo-targeting-pro-by-country-prices-taxes-currency-.jpg)
But if you use any of our geolocation or fraud prevention products you’ve probably already seen the caveat we post throughout our documentation, that our data is never precise enough to locate the street address of a particular household. Our data does a good job of estimating the approximate location of IP addresses (see the accuracy for our GeoIP2 City database). While the pin on the map might lead us to think that the IP address is close to the center of this circle, in reality we’re defining a region in which the IP address is very likely to be. The actual geolocation of the IP address is likely within the circle with its center at the geolocation coordinates and a radius equal to the accuracy radius field. All of our IP geolocation data comes with an accuracy radius field. Whether you’re localizing content, implementing geofencing, or gathering data for security and analytics, you start with an IP address and hope for something like the latitude and longitude of the end-user. Targeting your content to users accurately can mean a significant increase in revenue, less friction for your customers, and in some cases the preservation of lucrative licenses and business relationships. There’s often a lot riding on your ability to locate the user with confidence. On some level, it makes sense that we would think about it this way because a lot of applications of IP geolocation are based on the premise of finding an end-user’s true location in the world. When we start thinking about IP geolocation, we might imagine a process of pinpointing, with some accuracy, the location of an end-user on the internet. Finally, we’ll consider a breadth of IP intelligence data that can be used in tandem with geolocation to answer key questions about IP addresses that you can leverage to get the most value for your applications. We’ll also dive into some of the considerations that shape the kind of data we produce and how we face questions of coverage, precision, and accuracy in order to deliver the most valuable data possible to our users. In the coming months, we’ll go into more detail about the specific methods we use to measure accuracy and gauge confidence in our geolocation data.
![geo maxmind geo maxmind](https://docs3.regularlabs.com/images/documentation/geoip/geoip-settings.png)
In light of these considerations, we’ll develop a deeper understanding of the constraints and opportunities for IP geolocation. In this post, we’ll talk about some common assumptions about how IP geolocation works and contextualize those assumptions in light of the structure of the internet and the distribution of the IP space across geographical regions. This month we’ll cover the basics, answering questions about how accurate IP geolocation is and why. As we approach our twentieth anniversary, we’ll be offering some insights into the industry. With nearly two decades in the business of IP geolocation, we spend a lot of time thinking about accuracy, but, as with all things big data, a simple question usually has a complex answer.