IP address location?

[spartan117]

Alright I live in Chicago. I recently purchased a dsl internet plan from AT&T. The internet was just activated. When I went to check the speeds I was getting on this site the IP address location was in Wichita, Kansas.

http://www.speedtest.net/

Can someone explain to me how the IP address location is chosen and what are the effects of having an IP address location different from the my actual location?

Any help is appreciated. And I am very much a novice in regards to internet networking and the like.

[Bolkonsky]

Is there a physical wire going into your house from the street, or is it a satellite plan, as in, you're getting it wireless.

If it's wireless, then your IP address is in Kansas because that's where they're transmitting from, most likely.

[spartan117]

Is there a physical wire going into your house from the street, or is it a satellite plan, as in, you're getting it wireless.

If it's wireless, then your IP address is in Kansas because that's where they're transmitting from, most likely.

My ISP is AT&T and am getting a DSL connection through a phone line connection. Although I currently do not own a desktop (It broke and I have yet to replace it) I am using a laptop and I have a wireless router. However for the test I switched to my wired network.

I am curious is the IP address "given" from the ISP or is determined via network settings. I know I have dynamic IP addresssing that my router assigns to whatever is connected to my network but doesnt the IP address location still show my actual location?

[Bolkonsky]

No, as far as I know your IP address will show the point of issue, so if it's issued in Kansas, that's why. It'd be weird if it was from that far away though.

In regards to dynamic vs static, no, you can only set a static gateway, the individual computer's IP, as far as I know. In most cases though, you can contact your provider for a static IP. I'm not real smart with networking though, so I could be mistaken. Better to have some of the geniuses answer.

[Simetrical]

IP address geolocation can use a variety of techniques. I'm not totally sure what techniques are most commonly used in practice. I'd guess the most common is just triangulation: send packets from a number of different locations and see how long they take. Sending from further away will take longer, so if you time from a bunch of places you can get the approximate location.

This isn't normally going to be very accurate. First of all, it will only even conceivably work to pinpoint the router you connect to at your ISP, not your actual computer, and that router might be far away, perhaps miles. If you use satellite Internet, for instance, it could be anywhere. Second of all, connections on the Internet go over a variety of media, pass through routers that might be loaded, might travel far out of the way to get a cheaper or higher-capacity route, etc. So triangulation will suffer from a lot of error.

Another way to do it would be to look at the reverse DNS of hops near you in a traceroute. Those will often disclose at least the state or country. You can also whois the IP address to figure out the address of the organization that registered it. There are probably other ways too. But in the end, it's all guesswork, so don't be surprised if it's way, way off. I've heard of someone in Britain being geolocated to the United States because they used AOL, so they were presumably in the same rotating pool of IP addresses as US customers.