Today, we can find the location of any person with whom we are communicating via the internet that can help us to allow or block connections. It is all about geolocation, and its accuracy is of great importance, but internet-connected device location may differ between IPv4 and IPv6. Using geolocation, you can get info about the Get City from IP Address through RF signals from the base stations of a mobile operator to triangulate the approximate physical location of a subscriber.
There are many benefits of geolocation, such as knowing your location with no chances of getting lost and navigating, determining the client’s location, and giving customized information. Once the physical location of a device and its user has been identified accurately, then geoblocking and Geofencing are two techniques that can be applied for enhanced security and permitting/restricting connections.
IPv6 Geolocation and its challenges
The accuracy for geolocation through an IP address is based on the preciseness of the information about the allocation of IP addresses gathered and maintained by RIRs and ISPs. Due to the more accuracy of iPv4 geolocation, it has been in use for many years. But when it comes to IPv6 geolocation, it is not as precise as it needs to be. IPv6 addresses are allocated by RIRs to ISPs or organizations directly. After that, ISPs assign addresses to customers, but this information related to location may not inevitably be well-documented. In any case, if the IPv6 addresses are newly assigned and not entered into the databases of geolocation, then it may lead to some issues.
When ICANN and IANA allocate iPv6 addresses to one of the 5 RIRs, the RIR’s region can be easily determined just based on the IPv6 address prefix. Here, RIRs are responsible for sustaining databases that have information related to organizations that have been assigned addresses, and this information is publicly available via their WHOIS interface. But RIRs want to stay away from becoming geolocation providers themselves as they have useful tools to provide when it comes to documenting IP address location information. IRRs can also have information about the address of organizations that are advertising their IP addresses with EBGP.
The best thing about IPv6 is that there is no need for NAT66 function that is equivalent to NAT4 and the internet address you are using is the address at the source, which will be utilized while making connections.
As an IPV6 prefix, allocations may be newer, and its database is not as well documented. To find out the accuracy of IPv4 and IPv6 geolocation, many tests and studies have been made. And according to those tests, it has been seen that IPV4 geolocation is more accurate than IPv6. Based on IPv6 allocations, there may be a huge difference in the geolocation, which shows how accurate it is.
Solution
There has been huge progress in making the advancements by some organizations when it comes to overcoming the challenges faced by IPv6 geolocation. And they have come up with the best solution, which is all about relying on geolocation software services and packages that support IPv6 addresses.
Many IP geolocation providers are supporting IPv6. Even Google provides its Geocoding API and Geolocation API to perform geolocation on IPv6 addresses, and talking about Google Maps, it has many application integrations.
Till now, it needs more work to be done to increase the accuracy of IPv6 geolocation. Although getting City from IP Address is not always a great idea to rely on IP addresses to authenticate users, IPv6 global addresses decrease internet anonymity, assure you to whom you are connecting, and may eventually provide greater location accuracy.
