IP Location wrong

Support & Bugs
1

Hi all,

http://whatismyipaddress.com correctly identifies the country (UK) and county of my IP address but Piwik 1.4 tells me that my IP address is in the USA.

Any suggestions please or more generally is piwik IP location data reliable?

Thanks

2

http://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/#faq_65

3

@ Thomas thanks for your reply. It is strange that accurate location info is not part of piwik core and needs a plugin. Anyway I have activated the GeoIP plugin but the location data is still wrong - IP address which http://whatismyipaddress.com correctly identifies as UK is showing in Piwik as USA.

Anyway I think I read that the GeoIP plugin provides city data so where can I see that?

Thanks

4

Plugin using GeoIP to accurately detect visitor countries, cities, and continent · Issue #5465 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub says…

‘For more performance, it is recommanded to install the module apache mod_geoip.’

Does ‘more performance’ mean more accuracy?

Thanks

5

More performance means faster. If you use mod_geoip, the geolocation is faster because it uses compiled C code instead of byte-code interpreted PHP.

mod_geoip could be made even faster if it cached the geo database in memory.

6

Hi Anthon,

let me “hijack” these thread. What´s with the problem of “unknown” city? In Dashboard I could select a country and then I only see “unknown city” but in the database all citys are in. It seams thats a wrong interpretation of the database fields. I hoped that these error will be fixed in 1.5 but it´s always there.

controlc.de

7

Controlcc: I don’t know the cause. I’ll investigate. Thanks.

8

Good news: GeoIP is now integrated in Piwik, enabling Accurate Visitors Geolocation in your Analytics reports. To enable GeoIP go to the Settings > Geolocation admin page, and follow the short instructions.

You can also get an even more accurate Country & City Database from here to enjoy top accuracy in detecting your visitors locations.

See also the documentation about Geolocation - Analytics Reports in Piwik.```

9

Without the GeoIP plugin you would get the location of the ISP as your IP location. This the default thing in IP lookup which all IP lookup sites such as IP-Details.com and others do. If you need the exact location then add up the plugin.

10

GeoIP is not longer required since GeoIP is now a core feature.

11

Did you use an smartphone using LTE network ?

If yes, here in Canada, Bell (ISP) has gived me an IP from a city 2 hours away from me.

So technically, all location detection from a cellphone network in Canada is false, and probably in USA to.

Not sure why dev team never tought about GPS geolocation for device… because right now, all LTE or 3G city detection is false. And probably 50% (if not more) of World Wide Web user using a mobile device in 2019 to go on internet…