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

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic evaluation of IP geolocation services in mobile networks and the Global South. Leveraging ground-truth location data from RIPE Atlas and UNICEF Giga, combined with BGP announcements and IP prefix analysis, the authors conduct a large-scale empirical assessment of four major geolocation services across 175 countries. The work reveals, for the first time, that prefix-level granularity is a key common factor driving high localization errors in these regions. Specifically, median geolocation error in mobile networks exceeds that of fixed networks by over an order of magnitude; failure rates reach 66–72% in Africa and 53–61% in Asia; and approximately 70% of mobile IP prefixes span geographic areas larger than 100 kilometers.

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.

Problem

• IP geolocation
• accuracy
• mobile networks
• Global South
• prefix granularity

Innovation

• IP geolocation
• prefix granularity
• mobile networks
• Global South
• geolocation accuracy