[ale] Maxmind

[abarton at mindspring.com (Alexander Barton)]

Terry Bailey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Given an IP, does anyone have an idea about what percent of the time 
> you get a telephone area code from the Maxmind database?  Also, does 
> anyone know about the accuracy of the database?
> 
> Maybe, there is something better than Maxmind.

I stumbled on a page of stats for MaxMind (I think published on their 
web site) where they rate how well they do.  One of the numbers, IIRC, 
was that they can locate a US-based IP address to a metropolitan area 
85% of the time.  That means 15% of the time it's no better than 
"somewhere in the US", with no state or city given.  That agrees with my 
observations of about a year ago crunching *lots* of individual lookups. 
  I think they've gotten much better since then.  Then there's accuracy. 
  We eventually had reason to notice that MaxMind was significantly 
wrong regarding COMCAST's DNS servers.

-Alexander