IP Geolocation in the IPv6 World

We get a lot of questions here at MaxMind about IPv6, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Accuracy is top of mind for every user of IP geolocation and this topic introduces questions about how effective geolocation can be for certain user segments. In this post, we explain a key reason for IPv6 addresses, how they’re allocated, and provide information about IPv6 geolocation accuracy . IPv6 IPv6 is the latest standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for assigning addresses to devices in order to enable communication within networks. It is the successor to the IPv4 standard, which suffers from the problem of exhaustion (of available IPv4 addresses ). IPv6 solves this problem by using a 128-bit address instead of IPv4’s 32-bit address, which yields a possible pool of IPv6 addresses that is more than 7.9 x 10^28 the pool of IPv4 addresses .