Location of ip address?

isley88

Reputable
Jan 16, 2017
22
0
4,520
if i had a ip address in a city in california, will this ip address always be for this location, or if i google the location of this ip address years later maybe someone in another late will have this exact same ip address?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


IP addresses can and do change.
The one you have today at your house will be somewhere else in the future.

Unless you pay your ISP extra for a static IP address.
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Years for any ip address is a long time. An ip address associated with an ISP generally gets moved around. This is why the term is a DYNAMIC IP address. It changes over time at a single account. It may be weeks or months. But years for a single IP address would be a small percentage of all IP addresses.
 

dshort01

Distinguished
Feb 14, 2006
269
0
18,860


I assume your talking about public IP addresses. Generally they are assigned in blocks to a particular ISP much like area codes. So most likely that same address would be specific to a geographic location but not necessarily. Public IP addresses are a hot commodity in that they are limited. I seriously doubt an ISP would ever give a block of them up. This is how I currently understand it. You should know there are various classes of IP address A through D and they all have specifically defined ranges. Here is a quick tutorial... http://blog.adiglobal.us/private-and-public-ip-address-ranges/

I get a few complaints at work, why when they go to certain websites they show they are on the east coast. It is because the website is doing a lookup on the public IP address and not the private IP address and since the gateway is located on the east coast that is the information they receive.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
Geolocation data is generally very inaccurate and is only as accurate as the update interval of geolocation databases and the accuracy of that data. As already mentioned by others, dynamic IPs tend to get shuffled around. The rate at which IPs move around can be faster than the rate at which geolocation databases are updated. Also, not all ISPs bother with updating their geolocation records to match the actual area where a block of IP addresses is being used. Some ISPs, like mine, simply geolocate their IP blocks at their main office or main PoP. Whenever a website uses geolocation to guess where I am, it is ~800km off.
 

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