{"id":152,"date":"2025-07-29T16:29:45","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/?p=152"},"modified":"2025-07-29T16:29:45","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:29:45","slug":"geo-mapping-asn-and-prefixes-still-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"Geo-Mapping ASN and Prefixes: Still Relevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I am currently revamping the entire <strong>BGPtrace<\/strong> system. Many ideas, but limited time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One topic I keep thinking about is: <strong>how important is the country code associated with an ASN or prefix?<\/strong> We understand that it can affect localization applications or impose IP-level service restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Applications may attempt to force the client (browser or app) to use location data for verification (yes, we know about GPS spoofing tricks).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, at the ISP or network service provider level, with multihoming and Anycast structures, prefixes are advertised globally without strict geographic boundaries. So, <strong>is it still useful to assign a country code to them?<\/strong> (Yes, we could use the country of company registration, but that&#8217;s a different issue.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This ties into another topic: <strong>summarizing traffic by country code<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If that&#8217;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?<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Thoughts? Discussion welcome.<\/strong>      <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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) &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/?p=152\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Geo-Mapping ASN and Prefixes: Still Relevant?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[160,7,15,165,164,9,149,163,161,162],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","tag-asn","tag-bgp","tag-bgptrace","tag-countrycode","tag-geo","tag-internet","tag-ipsec","tag-netflow","tag-networking","tag-reporting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgptrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}