ISP giving wrong geolocation

[m0k]

My IP address all of a sudden seems to be associated with a city more than 400km from me.....
It's increased my latency and is quite noticible
IPleaktest
DNSleaktest
Google Maps
Speedtest

all of these services show that im located in Ottawa even though im in Toronto

I've already done a factory reset on my Netgear R7000 and powercycled the modem and router a few times but my internet still seems to be routed through Ottawa

[GreezyJeezy]

did they move their servers or something? call them and ask

[m0k]

4 minutes ago, GreezyJeezy said:

did they move their servers or something? call them and ask

oh god i cant even imagine trying to call Rogers and waiting an hour to explain this 
they would reply with "but have you moved to the city of ottawa?"

[KuJoe]

Your geolocation should not have any impact on your actual routing so your latency for most services will not be affected. The only thing you can do is contact the handful of geolocation databases and see if they'll update your IP's geolocation even though you're not the IP owner (these databases usually get updated in the beginning of the month so it might take a few weeks for the change to appear and even longer if the services using these databases don't update them regularly).

 

ip2location.com and maxmind.com are the 2 databases I deal with regularly. You can also check on their website what the geolocation is for your home IP to see if they are in fact incorrect.

[tt2468]

On 5/20/2016 at 5:35 PM, KuJoe said:

Your geolocation should not have any impact on your actual routing so your latency for most services will not be affected. The only thing you can do is contact the handful of geolocation databases and see if they'll update your IP's geolocation even though you're not the IP owner (these databases usually get updated in the beginning of the month so it might take a few weeks for the change to appear and even longer if the services using these databases don't update them regularly).

 

ip2location.com and maxmind.com are the 2 databases I deal with regularly. You can also check on their website what the geolocation is for your home IP to see if they are in fact incorrect.

Some games will use geolocation databases to determine the closest servers to you. When I had Cox, my IP ended up being located to somewhere in New York, even though I was in SoCal. I had pings upwards of 80ms in CS:GO, because I was connecting to east coast servers. I finally just decided to spoof my mac to get new IP leases until I was on a different IP block.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, tt2468 said:

Some games will use geolocation databases to determine the closest servers to you. When I had Cox, my IP ended up being located to somewhere in New York, even though I was in SoCal. I had pings upwards of 80ms in CS:GO, because I was connecting to east coast servers. I finally just decided to spoof my mac to get new IP leases until I was on a different IP block.

They really should use geolocation along with latency tests to match you with the best servers. It is widely known that gelocation data can be significantly wrong so solely trusting that is asking for trouble.

 

But then again I want them to bring back proper server lists and hosting so I can decided for myself what to connect to, you know like not treat us all like idiots. Quick match along with server lists was perfectly fine, who ever made the decision to change away from that needs a good slap.

[Wombo]

Geolocation is handled by the IP owner and typically most ISP's just match their geolocation data to their ARIN (for north america) WHOIS information. Generally speaking geolocation based on IP is mostly superfluous and should have little to no affect on latency, leaning far more towards the later.

[Mark77]

ISPs don't really care about inverse DNS records, and most of them aren't even updated to reflect the current network configuration.  They don't serve much of any legitimate network engineering purpose in this era of bridged/flat Ethernet backbone networks.  "Geolocation" is something done by internet servers (not your ISP) and is notorious for being inaccurate.   In this era of tunnels, etc., companies that purport to use "geolocation" to deny service to customers are only shooting themselves in the feet and making themselves look foolish (*cough*Netflix*cough*).

 

One thing that you can do, in some circumstances, is install a GPS receiver in your computer (ie: Sierra Wireless MC - series in USB/miniPCI-E flavor), and enable "location services" in your operating system and web browsers.  When you do this, sites that are "location-aware" will localize their location-aware content to your present physical location much like you may have experienced with an iPhone or Android device for mobile browsing or apps.

 

The downside?  When you provide a precise GPS fix of where you are to websites, you lose some degree of anonymity.