Lost in the Prefix: Revisiting IP Geolocation Accuracy Across Networks and Geographies

TL;DR

This study evaluates the accuracy of four major IP geolocation databases across different network types and regions, revealing significant disparities especially in mobile networks and Global South regions due to prefix granularity.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, empirical analysis of geolocation accuracy, highlighting the impact of prefix granularity on errors across networks and geographies.

Findings

Mobile networks have median errors over 10 times higher than fixed networks.

Regions in the Global South have significantly higher failure rates than the Global North.

Coarser prefixes are linked to higher geolocation errors across all providers and regions.

Abstract

IP geolocation databases are widely used in research, policy, and industry, yet their accuracy across network types and geographies remains poorly characterized. We present a large scale evaluation of four major providers (MaxMind GeoLite2, IPinfo, IP2Location, and DB-IP) using ground truth from RIPE Atlas and UNICEF Giga across 175 countries. We find that mobile networks exhibit median errors more than 10 times higher than fixed networks across all providers (179--207~km vs.\ 3--16~km), and that Global South regions show significantly higher failure rates than Global North: Asia exceeds 53--61\% and Africa 66--72\%, compared to 9--20\% in Europe. We trace both gaps to a shared structural source: provider prefixes in mobile networks and Global South geographies are more likely to be coarser than BGP announcements, and approximately 70\% of mobile prefixes span more than 100~km geographically. Our findings point to prefix granularity as a common explanatory factor: coarser prefixes consistently produce the highest errors regardless of provider, network type, or geography.