Akamai Geolocation Secret Sauce?

Sat Sep 5 04:36:16 UTC 2015

Akamai’s DB is frequently updated, not dependent upon SWIP, and has been measured as the most accurate of all the providers for something over a decade.

How they do it is proprietary. And sure, it can be wrong. Very wrong. But those times are rare, and they are good at updating when you tell them.

If you think about it, Akamai updates its CDN map frequently, and is not limited to the prefixes in the DFZ. So keeping a geo-location DB - not giving away any secrets here, just hypothesizing - seems like it would almost, but not quite, just fall out of all the other work they are doing anyway.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

> On Sep 4, 2015, at 11:37 PM, Gustavo Rodrigues Ramos <gustavo at nexthop.com.br> wrote:
> 
> Hello Ray,
> 
> I'm not familiar with Akamai's secret sauce. But I suppose geolocation
> databases can be outdated very fast over time and things are getting worst
> with the ipv4 depletion...
> 
> However, if you have a very large number of nodes spread across the globe,
> you could use rtt and edns0 client subnet to map users and their locations.
> 
> https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/03/intelligent-user-mapping-in-the-cloud.html
> https://blogs.akamai.com/2015/08/end-user-mapping-brings-users-closer-to-internet-nirvana.html
> 
> Regards,
> Gustavo.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Ray Van Dolson <rvandolson at esri.com> wrote:
> 
>> Anyone familiar with how Akamai does its geolocation?  Presumably they
>> do more than Maxmind/WHOIS, but I suppose one or both of those could
>> factor in?
>> 
>> For those of you with ARIN IP space, do you typically SWIP things to
>> yourself to help clarify the locations where the IP space physically
>> resides to feed into Geolocation databases?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Ray
>> 