[ncc-services-wg] IP geolocation services

Hi,

Because of the reasons stated below LIR's databases seems not to be 
perfect place to store geolocalization information.

First of all IP block may be distibuted among different countries.
Secondly information in database isn't updated along with network topology 
changes - in real cooperation with growing CDN solutions it should be 
updated along with every network topology change (even along with 
links failures).

It seems that BGP is the only answer for the problem. Within my network I 
use geographic communities to feed CDN network with information about 
current network topology.

Why not to use this idea in global scale: We could propose new RFC and 
agree that there is reserved community ASN:xxyy
ASN advertising ASN number
xx is global comunity number for geolocalization
yy is countrycode

The only problem is to have global acceptance for xx as reserved 
community number and time needed for deployment in majority of networks.

Konrad Plich



On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Arkley, Patrick wrote:

> Hi.
>
> I think this should be addressed to the companies using Geolocation technics. Not the the RIR's nor the LIR's.
> We have had these issues with Google and has seeked answers from them on numerous occasions on how they do their Geolocation stuff. No respons what so ever.
> We tried to accomodate the customer wishes by changing the country of the Inetnum (violating our internal policies on how an Inetnum should be set up) but it didn't work of course.
>
> As long as they are not interested in discussing this I don't think the RIR's should do anything in their db's or change how they work the db.
>
> The users suffering should turn to Google, Yahoo or whatever the company using geolocation and complain. Not to the LIR nor to the RIR.
>
> Rgds
>
> Patrick Arkley
> European Hostmaster
> Verizon
> ** sent from mobile device **
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ncc-services-wg-admin at ripe.net <ncc-services-wg-admin at ripe.net>
> To: Vegard Svanberg <vegard at monsternett.no>
> Cc: ncc-services-wg at ripe.net <ncc-services-wg at ripe.net>
> Sent: Tue Oct 27 17:18:41 2009
> Subject: Re: [ncc-services-wg] IP geolocation services
>
> With my DB-WG Chair hat on:
>
> Trying to - with reasonable accuracy - deduct geo-location-info for a
> particular end-system using a particualr address, at a particular point in
> time, from a block registered in a particular RIR's DB as an assignment is
> very bad idea to begin with.
>
> At least for the RIPE-DB, there are no agreed or definend semantics for
> the interpretation of the country: attribute. The data is a hint, at best.
>
> Actually, the country codes entered could point to the home country of a
> particular LIR's administrative location, to the location of the responsible
> NOC (operating from abroad) or something altogether, completely, arbitrary.
> Also, there are the codes "ZZ" and "EU", neither of which is clearly defined
> regarding its meaning.
>
> Just to fill in some background: a while ago we had the discussion in the
> DB-WG proposing to completely remove the country attribute for the reasons
> given. However, we received input that requested the country data to be
> kept, but *purely* for statistical reasons! It was understood that the
> accuracy and quality of that sort of data is just good enough exclusively
> for *that* pupose - but not really for something else and least for basing
> operational decisions on!
>
> Now, taking off my DB-WG hat....
>
> My personal feeling is that the RIRs' databases are definitely the wrong
> place to maintain such (volatile) data (in many cases for subranges of
> registry entries!) and the RIRs are the wrong organisatins to get involved
> with such a "service".
>
> And, to top it off, with mobile users and tunnels, the whole concept of
> managing access to data or services based on an IP address is going to brake
> more often than it does already ;-)
>
> Wilfried
>
> Vegard Svanberg wrote:
>
>> We've recently experienced a storm of customer complaints after starting
>> to use IP addresses from a new allocation/assignment. The IP block was
>> earlier in use by a German company. The result is that services like
>> Google and Yahoo assume users are from Germany and presents content
>> accordingly. Some users have also reported that they are excluded from
>> certain services.
>>
>> A quick web search reveals that this is a pretty common problem.
>>
>> While not blaming RIPE or the other RIRs, we believe this problem should
>> be addressed, and that the initiative has to come from the RIRs.
>>
>> I would like to propose that RIPE NCC works together with other RIRs to
>> see if it's possible to implement procedures/routines to notify
>> providers and users of IP geolocation services of new, relocated and
>> deleted allocations.
>>
>> Also, one should probably consider if it's a need for a (distributed?)
>> database with more fine-grained location data than the whois database
>> currently provides (also, I've been told that licensing issues prohibits
>> geolocation providers from using the RIR DBs directly, but I've not been
>> able to verify this).
>>
>> Apologies in advance if this has been discussed before -- I searched the
>> archive, but got no hits.
>>
>
>
>
>
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>