Incorrect Geo Locating

[apalemick]

Unfortunately, I may have to leave Sonic. The current issue is:

Sonic uses a third party to assign IP geolocations. My IP address is assigned to Santa Rosa. Unfortunately, I live in LA. This causes some annoying problems, like every time I go to look up movies or other nearby information, I have to correct my location as I'm always given movie listings for Santa Rosa.

That's not the worst thing in the world, considering Sonic.net service.

What is bad is that I'm a SF Giants fan. All games are blocked on my Dish service and through MLB.tv. I watch a lot of games and I watch them on three devices: my computer, my xbox and my iPad. Last year, I was mostly just watching on my computer and I was able to convince MLB to give me access on my computer. But this year I plan on watching a lot of games on the xbox.

Not sure if anyone has had this problem or if anyone found a solution or workaround. Thanks.

[dane]

Unfortunately, I may have to leave Sonic. The current issue is:

Sonic uses a third party to assign IP geolocations. My IP address is assigned to Santa Rosa. Unfortunately, I live in LA. This causes some annoying problems, like every time I go to look up movies or other nearby information, I have to correct my location as I'm always given movie listings for Santa Rosa.

IP geolocation isn't done by us, nor do we "use" anyone - it's a specialty function of a variety of information service providers, who are then used by entities like Dish. If you can work out who the various entities these folks using, we could poke them to tell them to update their database, but until that happens, you're likely to get bad data - and this isn't something we can really control.

It makes no sense that a service provider's vast pool of IP addresses would be geolocated to their headquarters location - we allocate them to the service points of presence around our territory, and the geolocation entities should be picking that up based upon route traces, browser/cookie hints, etc. There's no real standard for geolocation, so the firms that do this are really just doing their best to guess where consumers are actually located.

[apalemick]

Okay, so if I ask MLB, Yahoo and Dish who they are using, I may be able to pinpoint which company is providing the incorrect information? And then I can contact Sonic and you can request they update, which will hopefully fix it?

I appreciate you responding.

[dane]

Or you could contact them. =)

[ez2laf]

I have the reverse problem. I was using a sports viewing service (that will remain un-named) that keeps thinking I live in Santa Clara instead of Los Angeles. Consequently, I get to see all of the LA teams. I don't want you to change anything.

[dane]

Maybe you two could duke it out!?