In 2023, IPinfo celebrated its tenth year of helping application builders, businesses, and security professionals make their apps more intelligent. The traditional gift for a tenth anniversary is tin, which can be polished to a high sheen and can prevent underlying layers from corrosion. This is appropriate for IPinfo since our data helps turn all manner of data into a rich source of analytics and empowers companies to make smarter decisions to prevent fraud and abuse.
In this season of celebration, we pause to take stock of our accomplishments over the past twelve months, and we have so much to celebrate!
Data improvements
Active measurement capabilities
In 2023 we’ve significantly increased our measurement capabilities by doubling our probe network size and enabling IPv6 on all of our servers supporting it. Our network now consists of 593 servers in 98 countries and 149 autonomous systems, including 321 servers with IPv6 connectivity.
We have seen our largest expansion in Asia with 104 new servers, including 19 in China where we’re present for the first time. We can now provide detailed telemetry from within the country rather than rely upon calculated or implied statistics. China is a crucial market for many industries, and the country accounts for a substantial and growing segment of Internet users and endpoints.
We have also improved our IPv6 collection capabilities, a challenge in itself due to the extremely large size of the IPv6 space: how do you even know which addresses are in use? To solve this issue we’ve partnered with the IPv6 Hitlist project to share data and contribute to the largest public list of IPv6 addresses. We are now collecting delay and path information for more than 300M IPv6 addresses each week.
At the end of 2022 we were within 42 ms for 90% of the responsive IPv4 addresses. At the end of 2023, we have nearly halved this delay by being within 23 ms for 90% of the responsive addresses, and within 8 ms for 50% of the addresses. These latency improvements directly translate into more accurate geolocation by allowing us to discard invalid geolocation hints, and to directly geolocate IP addresses through multilateration.
In total, we collect delay and path measurements for 73k autonomous systems (96% of the autonomous systems visible in the Internet routing table), including 3.9M IPv4 routers and 44M IPv6 routers (this large difference is explained by the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) to address IPv4 exhaustion, which hides a lot of routers).
As the needs of the world's most innovative companies change, IPinfo will continue to adapt to meet these demands. As IPv6 adoption accelerates and new network use cases arise, IPinfo will continue to ensure that accurate data is available no matter what changes come to the Internet.
IP address tags
In addition to providing the most accurate IP data, we have continued to evolve how we present data with the use of tags.
In the example above, we have determined that the system at IP address 95.181.238.110 has operated as a web server and a VPN host, and the corresponding tags indicate this. IPinfo will continue to evolve how we present and process IP information for you, and we go beyond simply providing location data (which, in this case, is in New Jersey, not in the Bahamas as other providers claim). We have much more planned for tags in 2024.
Additional free data available
IPinfo is committed to providing the world’s most accurate IP intelligence data to both free and paying customers, and we continued to honor this commitment in February, with the release of our free IP to country and ASN database. We will always offer 100% accurate free data, both to support not-for-profit and academic users and to provide enterprise customers with an accurate assessment of our service before purchasing a subscription.
Expanded partnerships
This summer, we also released our IP to country/ASN data set on Google’s Analytics Hub for free. This allows GCP customers to easily integrate our data for use in BigQuery without usage restrictions, furthering our commitment to making our data as easy to use as possible.
A growing customer base
We’d love to tell you about how we are the easiest IP data provider to use or the best provider on the market, but we don’t have to. You keep telling us. Once again, you rated IPinfo as the best IP data provider and the easiest provider to use on G2. Thank you to all of our amazing users and customers for your support!
Here are just a few IPinfo success stories from 2023:
Oort
Oort partners with IPinfo to provide unified threat intelligence to prevent, detect, and respond to threats efficiently and in real-time. By integrating our data, Oort estimates a 5x increase in efficiency for their data science teams.
“With IPinfo, our chief data scientist could immediately access the information in a table and then start to implement it. From an evaluation perspective on our end, this is completely different and a bit of a game changer.” – Didi Dotan, CTO at Oort
Checkout.com
Checkout.com needs to ensure that every payment processed is legitimate, as fraudulent transactions are costly for all parties involved. After evaluating our data against the competition, Checkout.com chose to partner with IPinfo due to our high accuracy and competitive pricing. Now their transactions can be screened for potential fraud without slowing down the transaction flow.
SiriusXM
Media distribution is subject to many digital rights restrictions and laws, and these can vary greatly by locality. To ensure compliance with contractual and legal obligations, SiriusXM uses data from IPinfo to adhere to state licensing requirements in the U.S.
2023 by the numbers
We are a data company, so it is only fitting to take a look at the year that was from a data analytics perspective. Here are some interesting statistics for IPinfo in 2023:
IPinfo community launch
This past spring, we officially launched the IPinfo Community, and the response has been tremendous. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we encourage you to join us there for documentation, code examples, and guided assistance to get started using our free and paid data products. This forum also gives IP data enthusiasts from around the world a place to collaborate, share projects, ask questions, and participate in events.
Speaking of events…
The Great IP Hunt
Thanks to YOU, our amazing community, our inaugural Great IP Hunt was a rousing success! We had over 300 hunters participate in the contest, and your ingenuity and technical skills were impressive. More than 200 prizes were awarded, and our top twenty participants submitted a mind-boggling total of 3.8 million IP addresses! Keep an eye out on our community forum for news about upcoming events.
Barcelona outing
In September, our team came together in beautiful Barcelona. This was our second all-hands outing at IPinfo, and we even found a bit of time to work amongst the play. As a globally distributed, remote-first company, we relish occasions such as this to meet in person, and we took the opportunity to share ideas and craft strategy under the Spanish sun.
Looking ahead with gratitude to 2024
"The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vince Lombardi
In 2024 and beyond, IPinfo will continue to extend the features of our data and expand the reach and capabilities of our unique probe network, all to further our mission to serve the world’s IP data needs better. In this holiday season, it seems fitting to take the wraps off a few other things we have in store for you in the coming year.
Just as our data helps drive your innovation, your feedback drives ours. The data engineering team at IPinfo is continuously improving the quality and accuracy of our data, and we will continue to roll out exciting new capabilities in 2024.
We are constantly impressed and inspired by the accomplishments of those who leverage our data to do great things, and we owe our success to all of you. If you would like to reach out to us about any of our data products or services, give us a shout on Twitter, or you can use our contact form to send us a message.
All of us at IPinfo wish all of you a happy and healthy holiday season, and best wishes for the new year!