GeoIP2 for retrieving city and region ?

[Roy Smith]

In article <krs3jj$vnq$1 at news.grnet.gr>,
 ÉΪÉ«É»όλας <nikos at superhost.gr> wrote:

> But then how do you explain the fact that 
> http://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip_demo pinpointed Thessalon£ki and not 
> Athens and for 2 friends of mine that use the same ISP as me but live 
> in different cities also accurately identified their locations too?

I just tried 24.136.109.105 on that demo.  It comes up with:

US Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey,
United States,
North America 
07632 40.8915,
-73.9471
Time Warner Cable
Time Warner Cable
rr.com
501

Not bad.  Google street view shows that as a very pretty residential 
neighborhood in one of New York's fancier suburbs.  Unfortunately, it 
happens to be in run-down industrial building in a factory district 
about 20 km away.

There are lots of interesting (and superior) ways to do geolocation 
other than looking up IP addresses.  Here's a few:

1) GPS.  Obviously, if you're on a device that has a GPS receiver and 
you have access to that data, and you've got a good signal, nothing is 
going to beat GPS.  Well, other than Glonass.  And Galileo and IRNSS, 
whenever they become operational.  And whatever the Chinese are calling 
theirs.

2) Cell (i.e. mobile) phone tower triangulation.  The phone systems know 
where all the towers are and know which towers your phone is receiving 
signal from.  Since they know the signal strengths from each of those 
towers, they can do a rough triangulation.  It's kind of messy since 
signal propagation depends terrain and obstructions which aren't well 
mapped.  But it's better than nothing.

3) WiFi triangulation.  Right now, I can see four WiFi networks (Worb, 
J24, MusicWiFi, and jcglinksys).  There are databases of WiFi network 
names and approximate locations (obtained by wardriving and other ways).  
If you can see enough networks, it's easy to look in the database and 
figure out where you must be.

4) Who knows what the future will bring.  I suppose some day, inertial 
nav will become cheap enough that we'll all be walking around with INS 
in our phones.

In general, mobile operating systems control direct access to all of 
these signals and only allow applications to get the location data when 
the user agrees to such access.