How often are IP addresses blocks for countries updated?

Question

I have a website where I want to find out visitor's country from his IP address. There are some databases of country's IPs range that can be used. when I download them to my database, should I be woried about some changes made in future? How often are IP's range for countries actualized?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 19 '12 at 13:13

IP addresses, postcodes, and the like, were not invented to directly encode geographical locations. That is, simply, not their purpose.

These things do change, and as you can see they change often enough for people to spot quite large errors from year to year. They also were never intended to represent countries in the first place. They represent the topgraphy of Internet network connections, not physical geography.

Then of course you have the difference between the end user's IP address and the back end of the HTTP proxy's IP address, on top of all that.

How often are IP addresses blocks for countries updated?

2 Answers2

IP addresses, postcodes, and the like, were not invented to directly encode geographical locations. That is, simply, not their purpose.

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