IP Geolocation Databases: Unreliable?

The most widely used technique for IP geolocation con- sists in building a database to keep the mapping between IP blocks and a geographic location. Several databases are available and are frequently used by many services and web sites in the Internet. Contrary to widespread belief, geolo- cation databases are far from being as reliable as they claim. In this paper, we conduct a comparison of several current geolocation databases -both commercial and free- to have an insight of the limitations in their usability.
First, the vast majority of entries in the databases refer only to a few popular countries (e.g., U.S.). This creates an imbalance in the representation of countries across the IP blocks of the databases. Second, these entries do not re- flect the original allocation of IP blocks, nor BGP announce- ments. In addition, we quantify the accuracy of geolocation databases on a large European ISP based on ground truth information. This is the first study using a ground truth show- ing that the overly fine granularity of database entries makes their accuracy worse, not better. Geolocation databases can claim country-level accuracy, but certainly not city-level.