Why Does My IP Address Belong to a Different State?
Networking can be a little confusing, especially when what you did (or didn’t do) makes no logical sense. You’ve installed a new cable modem and wireless router and your speed is worse than your old hardware. You plug your home into Gigabit Ethernet just to watch your connection switch between Gigabit and Fast Ethernet for no reason.
Strange network problems continue. Here’s a simple request we got this week from Lifehacker reader Cheryl :
“My public IP address speaks of a completely different city and state. Why? The IP address will also change. Please advise. Who can I contact? “
First, I wouldn’t worry about it. Really. I would be more worried about the speed of my ISP than my external IP (which you can find right here ). I did it right now, and the site tells me that the IP address comes from a city in California that is about in the immediate vicinity of where I live (about 20-30 minutes or so), but not quite there. where I live. This does not affect my ability to connect to the Internet at the normal speed that my roommates and I pay for. Things are good.
As for your IP address coming from a different state, that’s perfectly fine too. As WhatismyIP.com points out:
“Your IP address can be found using our IP search tool. No IP Lookup tool can be 100% accurate due to many different factors. Some of these factors include where the owner of the IP registered it, where the IP control agency is located, proxies, cellular IP addresses, etc. If you are located in the United States and the IP controlling agency is located in Canada, chances are IP address search results will appear as Canada. Displaying a Canadian IP address in the North of the United States is very common among mobile users on the Verizon network. ”
While it can be annoying if a website or service tries to provide you with information based on an IP address lookup – your favorite online mapping app, for example – you’ll have to face this minor annoyance. I can feel you on this one too; I used to have to use a VPN for a company based in New York, which by default always made Google Maps load non-California when I opened the site. I’m used to it.
You can try calling your ISP to see if they have any solution to your problem if it really bothers you, but I doubt they can do anything – if the support agents really understand from the start your problem to be honest. Your IP address might be tied to the MAC address of your modem on the Comcast side, and they can’t do anything about it.
You can also pay your ISP for the privilege of a static IP address, which may better reflect where you actually live, but I wouldn’t spend any money on that unless this issue is seriously interfering with your life. As I said, you will have to get used to this annoyance. And hey, it could be worse, as our friends at Splinter wrote in 2016:
“Any geographer botanist knows that the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitude and longitude of the central point is 39 ° 50′N 98 ° 35′W. On digital maps, this number is ugly: 39.8333333, -98.585522. So, back in 2002, when MaxMind first chose a default point on its digital map for the center of the United States, it decided to clean up the measurements and choose simpler, closer latitude and longitude values: 38 ° N, 97 ° W, or 38.0000, – 97.0000.
As a result, over the past 14 years, every time MaxMind was asked for the location of an IP address in the United States that it could not identify, it returned the default location for a point two hours from the geographic location. center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in total there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with this coordinate by default. If any of these IP addresses are used by a scammer, cyber thief or suicidal person contacting support, the MaxMind database puts them in the same location: 38.0000, -97.0000.
Who ended up in the courtyard of Joyce Taylor’s house. “
Ouch.