Fix IPv4 geolocation,
provider by provider.
Few things cause as much day-to-day trouble for an address holder as incorrect geolocation. Users get shown the wrong country or the wrong city, and traffic ends up an ocean away from the CDN edge that it should have been reaching. The geolocation tool in the Prefixx portal was built with this exact situation in mind. It checks your ranges against the four geolocation databases that matter most, points out which provider is holding the incorrect data, and then helps you to carry the fix through that provider's own correction process.
One desired location. Four databases held to it.
Most people are surprised to learn that the geolocation data used by websites, banks, streaming services and content networks comes from just a handful of commercial databases. The four that matter most in practice are MaxMind, ipinfo.io, IP2Location and DB-IP. Each of these companies maintains its own database, gathers its own data, and publishes updates on its own schedule, and none of them answers to anyone else. Because they do not synchronize with one another, it is entirely possible for a range to be listed correctly in three of the four databases while the fourth continues to place it in the wrong country for half a year. When that happens, a fraud filter somewhere may quietly keep declining perfectly legitimate card payments, and it can take a very long time before anyone works out that geolocation is actually the cause.
It is for this reason that our approach starts from the information that you, as the holder of the addresses, already know to be correct, rather than asking the databases which of them happens to be right. In the portal you record the desired location for each of your ranges: the country, the region, the city, and if you wish the coordinates and an organization name as well. Once this preference has been saved, it becomes the reference point for every check that follows. A check then selects one sample IP address from every /26 in the range (which works out to four samples across a /24), queries all four providers about each sample, and compares their answers to your preference field by field.
The practical result of this comparison is that any incorrect data gets attributed to the specific provider that holds it. So rather than being left with a vague sense that geolocation is broken somewhere, you can see exactly which provider needs your attention, and for which field on which range.
From wrong-country to corrected.
Everything described below is handled under the Geolocation section of the portal, so there is no need to keep a spreadsheet or a bookmark folder with four different correction forms in it.
Set preferences
The first step is to go to Geolocation → Preferences and record where each of your ranges should be located. The fields to fill in are the two-letter country code, the country name, the region and the city. Coordinates and an organization name are optional, but we would certainly recommend filling them in as well, since a more complete preference gives the comparison a sharper baseline to work from.
Run a geo check
Once your preferences are in place, you can run a check from the range detail page. The portal takes one sample IP address from every /26 in the range and queries all four providers about each one. Please note that you can run one manual scan per range per day. That may sound restrictive at first, but in practice it is more than enough, because the providers themselves only refresh their own data every few weeks anyway.
Read the breakdown
When the check has completed, you will see four cards, one for each provider, showing what that database currently reports next to the values that you have set. Fields where the two agree are shown in green, while fields where they differ are flagged, and it is of course the flagged entries that require your attention.
File the correction
For each provider that holds incorrect data, we would strongly encourage you to file the correction through the portal rather than going straight to the provider's website. The portal logs the range, the sample IP and the desired values before opening the provider's own correction form, which means that three weeks later you can still see exactly which corrections were filed and when they were filed. Once you find yourself tracking several corrections at the same time, you will be glad to have this record.
It is worth being realistic about the timeline. Each provider processes corrections on its own schedule, and in our experience this usually takes somewhere between one and four weeks; there is unfortunately no way to speed the process up. What the Corrections page does give you is a reliable record of what was filed, where and when, so that you always know when it is time to check again.
Prefixx publishes your geo. Providers pull it.
Filing a correction fixes the mistake that exists today, but a geofeed goes a step further and helps to prevent the next one from happening at all. Prefixx publishes prefixx.net/geofeed.csv in the RFC 8805 format that geolocation providers are able to ingest directly, and every location that you set in the portal flows into this feed. In this way your desired locations are being asserted continuously, around the clock, rather than one correction ticket at a time.
Or let us run it for you
The geolocation tooling is included with every client account at no additional charge. Clients on our white-glove service do not even need to do the filing themselves: our team sets the preferences, submits the corrections to each provider, and keeps following up until the change is actually visible. All you need to do is tell us where the block belongs.
White-glove details →Geolocation: common questions
In most cases a correction takes somewhere between one and four weeks, and the exact time genuinely varies from one provider to the next. All four providers accept corrections through their web forms, but the services that consume their data downstream, such as mail filters and content networks, refresh on their own schedules as well, so it is normal to see a little additional delay on top of that. Our advice is to log the filing, wait about two weeks, and then re-run the check. If the data is still wrong at that point, simply repeat the process.
The providers show different locations because they build their databases from different raw material. One of them leans mainly on routing tables, another on WHOIS data, and a third on latency probes and whatever its users submit. Recently transferred blocks tend to show this problem at its worst: three of the databases may catch up fairly quickly while the fourth continues to show the old country for months on end. This is exactly the reason why the portal places all four providers side by side, so that the one lagging behind is easy to identify.
You can run one manual geolocation scan per range per day. Scans are drawn from your organization's shared pool of daily credits, which is also used by the BGP and reputation tools, and the pool resets at midnight. One scan per day may sound limiting at first, but when you remember that the providers only update their data every few weeks, daily coverage is honestly more than the problem requires.
Put your ranges where they belong.
The geolocation tooling comes free with a client account, and that includes the checks, the correction tracking and the published geofeed.
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