Geolocation and Starlink

Summary

The ISP Column A column on various things Internet Other Formats: Geolocation and Starlink September 2025 Geoff Huston "Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The Internet did not adopt a geographic address plan which means that you're going to need a lot of additional information if you want to map an IP address into a location at the level of a country or a city. Creating and maintaining such collections of geolocation data that maps IP addresses to a geolocation presents some challenges. Even a basic question, such as "How are you going to represent a location?" has a variety of answers. One could use latitude and longitude, but this has its own complications. What if you just wanted to map addresses into countries? You need a representation of a political map to translate these coordinates into a country. Or you could avoid these multiple layers of indirection and simply map IP addresses into countries. However, once you start referring to countries you run into a new set of questions, starting with the most basic ones of "What's a country?" and "What's a uniform way of naming them?" Thankfully these are not novel questions, and we can leverage the work of others to provide some answers here. These is the group that maintains the ISO 3166 standard, published by the International Organization for Standardisation that enumerates a list of codes of countries and dependant territories, using both 2 letter codes, three letter codes and three-digit numeric codes, all maintained by the imaginatively named "ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency," a group of 15 voting experts. There is also the United Nations Statistics Division, a body that maintains a number of related lists, including the "official" name of each c...