Hi,
In fact, geolocation providers should be using geofeed data as tier 1 data since they are self-published. Are you saying you know more about my prefixes than me?
IP geolocation needs to be: - Verifiable - Granular - Accurate That means we need to know just enough to point to the right ZIP code or the right city. Here is our organizational approach to IP geolocation service. - Active measurement involves building a network of 1320 servers across 555 cities and in 152 countries, continuously expanding. This network of servers, designed to generate continuous Internet measurements, is unique to us, not the industry. This is a continuously growing network of servers. - We have made massive investments in data processing and machine learning. - We have a research team dedicated to R&D to find new ways to improve the accuracy and granularity of IP geolocation. - We have complementary administrative teams dedicated to support and outreach. The reason goes back to the 3 points. - Verification: Geofeed cannot be verified. Geofeeds, in most cases, are not well-maintained. - Granularity: Geofeeds from major ISPs often point to the country level or the closest major town. - Accuracy: Geofeed does not come with an accuracy guarantee. We like geofeed. It is another source of data. Even with active measurement, we may need help from ASN. When active measurement fails we have to fall back to something. Geofeed is good. But geofeed is not universal solution. More often thatn geofeed can be misleading or the data insights may not be there. The smaller ISPs diligently publish geofeed and we deeply appreciate them. We constantly have ongoing conversations with them (like we are having here) about our data accuracy and what we can do to fix it. If they say your data is not good for us, we will run our tests and we will work out a solution with them. We are always there. At a global scale, geofeed is a trust-based system. But the internet is a concept verification-based system. Even though geofeed represents another data source for us, it is not the best data source. That is why we are investing in our generating first-party data sources for IP geolocation. — Abdullah | DevRel, IPinfo