It allows for the non-intrusive geographic location of most Internet users to their town, city or region in real time. The technology developed by geobytes is unique. On the other hand, because our map’s accuracy is largely based on the available seed points, and because the number of seed points we will have for a given subnet is proportional to the traffic that it carries, our map’s accuracy will be very high where it matters most – where its resolutions will effect the most traffic. This is one of the weaknesses of our mapping method, but it’s impact on real world performance is limited because it is confined to the larger number of subnets which carry practically no traffic. Where it does contain very low traffic subnets, it’s resolutions may not be as dependable due to the proportionately low number of seed points that we have pertaining to these subnets. Apart from Phantom addresses, our map may not contain addresses of infrequently used, very low traffic subnets. Our research shows that 9 out of 10 of the theoretical total of 256*256*256 = 16,777,216 subnets are either “Phantom” subnets, or don’t carry any traffic at all. Why not?īecause our map is built from real traffic it does not contain the locations for Phantom IP Addresses – A Phantom IP Address is one that does not appear in any ISP’s BGP (Border Gateway protocol) tables and accordingly can not carry traffic. I enter a random IP Address and it could not locate it. What this means is that a WhoIs based database will have to be 10 times larger than it would otherwise need to be. The remaining 90% will make it as far as your ISP’s BGP router and then go nowhere. (Addresses that are not configured in any ISP’s BGP router tables.) Only about 10% of the theoretical 4 Billion IP addresses are actually routable across the net. In addition to accuracy, the problem with using WhoIs data is that it contains phantom addresses – addresses that have been allocated but are not used. We then run this data through a series of algorithms which identify and extract collaborating seed points. All of these sites ask the web surfer to provide their geographic location, and this location along with the user’s IP Address is forwarded to us as seed data. To achieve this we acquire seed data from a number of sources. On the other hand, the purpose of the Geobytes map is to map IP Addresses to geographical locations. Given these points and the fact that the WHOIS data will locate all of an ISP’s address space to the same city, then it is difficult to see how the WHOIS data, even if it was kept up to date, could be geographically accurate. Compounding the problem further, the large and successful ISP’s that carry the bulk of the Internet’s traffic tend to service wide geographic areas. While the granularity of the Geobytes map, is that of a single subnet – placing each subnet individually within the geographic area that it services, the WHOIS data has a granularity of “company” (or ISP), placing all subnets “allocated” to a given ISP in the same geographic location. It is essentially an ISP Map, rather than an IP Address Map. The purpose of the WHOIS data is to identify the entity (person or company) to which a block of addresses have been delegated. Why does your data differ from the WHOIS data?
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