ACSP Suggestion 2008.24: NetRange with incorrect Geo-IP information

Suggestion

Author: Jeff Winters   
Submitted On: 18 December 2008

Description:

Liberty Bell Telecom was allocated NetRange: 67.214.48.0 /20 on November 20, 2008. We have found that 5 of the 16 /24 subnet within this NetRange have incorrect Geo-IP information and come back within company databases as being in South America.

Symptoms that we are seeing:

  1. www.google.com is in Spanish
  2. Web pages are slow - am assuming this is due to folks like Akamai sending them to content caches in Chile.
  3. End-user unable to complete an online e-commerce transaction due to a fraud-prevention service thinking he was a Chilean user trying to buy something with a US-based credit card.

We have contacted Google and Akamai in an effort to solve the issue. However; there could be numerous GEO-IP databases that have the wrong information for the subnets within this NetRange.

We have concerns about what if this does not get fixed. Out of the 16 /24 subnets we have 5 that will not resolve correctly. When we are looking at deploying these IP’s to a number of customers we have catch 22 that we are in. We have known IP’s that will not work today. If the GEO-IP issue is not resolved on the 5 /24 subnets by the time we need to start using them, we will have customers that won’t function correctly. Then we are in the predicament that we need to use 80% of our allocated netblock before we can request another netblock from ARIN.

I’m requesting that ARIN send a notification about this issue to their subscribers in an effort to the get the issue resolved.

Timeframe: Immediate

Status: Closed   Updated: 26 February 2009

Tracking Information

ARIN Comment

26 February 2009

On 26 February 2009 ARIN sent out an email informing resource points of contact of this issue. The text of that email follows:

Per a request from an ARIN customer, ARIN is sending you this letter as a courtesy notification of problems some registrants of ARIN-issued IPv4 addresses have experienced.

Some geolocation and content providers are misidentifying ARIN-issued address space as being outside the ARIN region. Common problems experienced by ARIN registrants over the last two years include:

  • search engines misidentifying the addresses as being in South America;
  • content caching providers sending traffic via nodes in South America; and
  • e-commerce transactions failing or being delaying due to fraud prevention procedures being triggered when the payment processing system believes the transaction is originating in South America.

Registrants have experienced these problems both with new IANA-issued /8s (like 173.0.0.0/8 and 174.0.0.0/8) and with /8s which ARIN has issued and re-issued over many years (like 63.0.0.0/8).

If you or your peers experience any of these types of problems, you are encouraged to contact and work with third-party information software vendors and/or the content providers directly to effect changes.

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