IP Address Help

[MaIic]

   Hello, I upgraded my internet recently. I am experiencing high ping in games. Come to find out, my IP is not near my geographical location. I live in Arkansas, but the IP is located in Denver.

   It is a dynamic IP address, so it changes here n there. Now it says I'm in Illinois. I feel like it's connecting to servers near those other places. Instead of linking me to the servers closest to Arkansas like it's supposed to.

   Idk, I'm a noob. Very confused because my internet is pretty decent. 860+ mbps on average. Someone help. This probably wasn't even the right place to post this. I'm just really confused and want to be on low ping :(

[mariushm]

The location of your IP address is often retrieved from outdated databases. 

For example, let's say that IP range was used by the ISP or another ISP in Denver a couple months ago and your ISP decided to buy that other ISP or to make some changes inside their network and now that IP range is allocated to devices in your area. 

Online tools don't actually have a way to know your location, they just rely on the information ISPs submit or information they determine through other means, so this information is not reliable. 

In my very own case, at work, we have internet from a company that only sells internet to businesses through dedicated fiber lines - they gave us a bunch of IP addresses that are detected as previously used in a city a few hundred miles away from my city, and they don't care to update or report the errors in such databases.

 

In Steam you can go in settings and choose the region from where to download updates, games, and possibly game matching ... and as for regular downloads, the closest download location is not always the fastest, it depends on your ISP and the peering agreements they have with other ISPs and datacenters.