I am currently revamping the entire BGPtrace system. Many ideas, but limited time.
One topic I keep thinking about is: how important is the country code associated with an ASN or prefix? We understand that it can affect localization applications or impose IP-level service restrictions.
Applications may attempt to force the client (browser or app) to use location data for verification (yes, we know about GPS spoofing tricks).
However, at the ISP or network service provider level, with multihoming and Anycast structures, prefixes are advertised globally without strict geographic boundaries. So, is it still useful to assign a country code to them? (Yes, we could use the country of company registration, but that’s a different issue.)
This ties into another topic: summarizing traffic by country code. For that, probes or NetFlow exporters should be geographically distributed. Only then can accurate data reports be produced. This is common practice in Internet traffic analysis.
If that’s the case, then using data from multiple RouteViews servers becomes essential for prefix analysis. Or perhaps combining tunneling with NetFlow/BGP route exports (an older method) is still the better approach?
Thoughts? Discussion welcome.