I live near Northampton.
When I use two factor authentication to log into work systems then, until last week, it reported by location as Northampton. Last Thursday the internet went off for several hours in the night. In an attempt to rectify it I restarted the router.
This cleared the outage but since then two factor authentication places me in York.
If I listen to internet radio, eg Classic FM, I'm getting ads for services like car dealerships in York.
A minor irritant rather than a serious issue but why does it do this?
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The reboot of the router will have given you a different public IP address (as it will have connected to a different modem bank somewhere - probably re-routing because the outage was specific to your normal connection).
Location from an IP address is an inexact science anyway, but is generally fairly close to your geographic location - depends on how accurate the config data for your connection route is)
If you use
www.iplocation.net/
...it will give you an element of information about your IP address, how you are connected, and where it thinks you are (which presumably will show York if you haven't reconnected)
(It is accurate for my connection)
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Blimey, my address is down as London.
That's a long way from Fishguard.
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Mine is where ever I want it to be. Currently New York.
Usually its where your ISP trunks stuff together.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 31 Aug 22 at 20:05
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I am that well known Scottish Town - London!
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Tried a router restart but still in York. Will try again later.
When I worked in Northampton office the location tended to be in the Wigan/Widnes/Knowsley orbit but occasionally in Buckley, Flintshire.
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If you clonk on "details" on that site, next to where it thinks you are, it seems to then pull suggestions from other ip location services. In my case, the original suggestion was a village ten miles away, and all the other suggestions were further and further away.
It also showed the word "Middleton" as part of the browser info, and I had fun chasing down what THAT was all about, but I'll leave that as nobody else will care.
Edit: Just tried it again, and this time it's NOT showing the other ip location services, so something has changed or I forgot exactly what I did to get it in the first place.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Fri 2 Sep 22 at 11:05
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...location by IP address alone is a mixed bag. If your ISP has properly registered the details, the IP address alone will likely show you (on the first page on the link) at a registered location for your ISP. (Mine does - nowhere near my physical location)
The more "sophisticated" IP Geolocation services, however, use a wealth of other information trawled for the IP address which can get much closer to identifying your physical location. That data can be rather dynamic, and as such may show location drift over time, or varying results depending on data used.
Clicking on the link above on "IP Address Details (Show more details)" will reveal a "best guess" from consolidated data used by this particular link.
Clicking on "details" against "IP Location" will reveal the databases it has used for this, and where each individual one places the physical location (you can see, the varying data used gives different values)
When I posted the link originally, using "IP Address Details (Show more details)" identified our village correctly. Today it is about 4 miles away (but still close).
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Having been in 'York' for four weeks I'm now back in Northampton!!
However yesterday, at the Guildhall in Northampton town centre I was 'near East Grinstead'.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Fri 30 Sep 22 at 09:10
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Google for me consistently gives me results from India. I looked it up. After making sure my location was UK in my Google account (it was) the next suggestion was vaguely "it's something to do with your Virgin broadband".
I'm now in Yorkshire on holiday, using their BT WiFi. My Google results are still offering me stuff from India.
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Location, Location, Location - tyrednemotional
