Poor quality CGNAT IPs

Looks like Hyperoptic have bought a load of IPs that used to be registered in China. Many sites geolocate to China, which causes some issues (eg: LinkedIn constantly asked for a +86 number for 'local regulation reasons).

It also seems to be triggering many sites to block with a captcha for unusual activity. Or it could be other users on the same CGNAT IP.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Hi there,

We'd like to make this more clear.

Hyperoptic assigns the IP to every customer and each IP is located in UK. We did add a new range of IPs to the pool from which we assign IPs to the customers. This new range of IPs was in the past registered to different locations than UK, however, they have been purchased from UK regulatory body as a UK registered IP address.

Every IP can be found in global Geolocation database. The issue is, if someone (the website you were visiting) is using an old geolocation database, it may show as your location to be outside of UK.

This is resolved by them (the website) updating their geolocation database as it's out of date. We are not the only provider that has this issue or had this issue in the past.

As the IP ranges are bought and sold from providers who no longer work.

The solution for this problem is contacting the service you are trying to use and asking them to update their geolocation database. We will do the same from our side.

Off the back of this - I've got a static IP and am in Manchester, but all the geolocation services say I'm in London. If I contacted support, could this be updated?

This is probably where the traffic enters an access router before being routed to peering or transit but as HyperOptic support has said it depends on the data held in the geolocation database the site is using.

In my case I'm in Bucks and I know my traffic gets handed off to Zen in London but one database says I'm in Norwich and another says I'm in Essex (I ran a check on https://www.iplocation.net/ but others are available of course)

Provided you are in the UK it shouldn't cause an issue but it is important to note that the support departments of ISPs cannot update third party databases if these are incorrect.

In reply to a post by Hyperoptic_CS:

Hi there,

We'd like to make this more clear.

Hyperoptic assigns the IP to every customer and each IP is located in UK. We did add a new range of IPs to the pool from which we assign IPs to the customers. This new range of IPs was in the past registered to different locations than UK, however, they have been purchased from UK regulatory body as a UK registered IP address.

Every IP can be found in global Geolocation database. The issue is, if someone (the website you were visiting) is using an old geolocation database, it may show as your location to be outside of UK.

This is resolved by them (the website) updating their geolocation database as it's out of date. We are not the only provider that has this issue or had this issue in the past.

As the IP ranges are bought and sold from providers who no longer work.

The solution for this problem is contacting the service you are trying to use and asking them to update their geolocation database. We will do the same from our side.

On my static, several major web sites recently geolocated me to either Romania, Ukraine or Switzerland. Looks like my IP is in a block previously owned by "Xt Global Networks Ltd." which at least explains Romania...

I suspect this may be in part to some companies using outdated / obsolete / abandoned geoip databases, but even some public geoip checker services still declare my IP to not be a UK one.

I ended up emailing a bunch of companies and pointing this out, but I'm fed up with doing that.

There's another problem I'm noticing which is Cloudflare constantly asking for CAPTCHAs. Probably someone on the same CGNAT external IP scraping a site or something which is causing it to block every cloudflare site.

Regarding the geoIP stuff, very few sites will update their geoip database regularly unless they use a 3rd party API for it. Often you just drop a .dat file in which has the country<>IP lookups, so honestly could be years before some sites get updated.

Getting hit badly by this again. Now getting Egypt all the time.

I really can't understand on the CGNAT IPs why they can't buy ex-UK ones, considering they serve thousands of tens of thousands of customers?