Geolocation and Starlink

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses a problem which cropped up recently with the location tagging of IP addresses seen in the APNIC Labs measurement system. For compiling national/economic and regional statistics, and to understand the experimental distribution into each market segment, Labs relies on the freely available geolocation databases from maxmind.com, and IPinfo.io -which in turn are constructed from a variety of sources such as BGP data, the RIR compiled resource distribution reports, Whois and RDAP declarations and the self-asserted RFC8805 format resource distribution statements that ISPs self publish. At best this mechanism is an approximation, and with increasing mobility of IP addresses worldwide it has become harder to be confident in the specific location of an IP address you see in the source of an internet dataflow, not the least because of the increasing use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and address cloaking methods such as Apple Private Relay, or Cloudflare Warp (although as Geoff notes, these systems do the best they can to account for the geographic distribution of their users in a coarse grained “privacy preserving” manner). Geoff was contacted by Ben Roberts of Digital Economy Kenya, a new boardmember of AFRINIC and long-time industry analyst and technical advisor. He’d noticed anomolies with the reporting of Internet statistics from Yemen, which simply could not be squared away with the realities of that segment of the Internet Economy. This in turn has lead Geoff to examine in detail the impact of Starlink on distribution of internet traffic, and make adjustments to his measurement Geolocation practices, which will become visible in the labs statistics as the smoothing functions work through the changes. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Space delivery of Internet has had rapid and sometimes surprising effects on the visibility of Internet worldwide. The orbital mechanics mean that virtually the entire surface of the globe is now fully internet enabled, albiet for a price above many in the local economy. This is altering the fundamentals of how we “see” Internet use and helps explain some of the problems which have been building up in the Labs data model.