IP Location issue

bayhett wrote:

 

We have the Nokia 5G21 Gateway, but I heard from a human T-Mobile employee at one of their retail stores that there is a “new” fancier 5G gateway available now - does anyone have this new hardware, but continue to have geolocation problems? 

 

 

A new gateway won’t help since any gateway or cellphone will connect to the same DHCP service that provides the dynamic IP addresses and those addresses have to come from a pool - keep in mind IP v4 has limited IPs available for the world to use so that’s why they are dynamic and not permanently assigned to you. 

I live near KC MO and I too get bopped around from a Denver IP and a Memphis IP - I've never got a location with 400mi!.  This is not a problem unique to T-mobile.  Verizon generally has me out of Chicago - just looked in the logs and my Verizon cell card in my laptop had me in Lakewood, CO, Gardner, KS, Berryton, KS, Scranton, KS, and Indianapolis, IN in just the last 24hrs!.  I see others on ATT in my logs bopping around Chicago and Kansas City and Houston. My Centurylink DSL line has me out of the other side of the state.  Basically, using IP addresses for geo-location has never been a good idea and website and content providers should stop relying on it as being accurate.

Knowing what I know...I still came here hoping to find a solution because I too am frustrated by this.  Here's what one of the GEO IP location database services has to say about this topic.  Keep in mind the websites you are visiting have to use one of these database services to get the location information.  They don't get it directly from your ISP (e.g. t-mobile, ATT, Verizon, etc)

“With those limitations in mind, we estimate that our GeoIP2 products can identify users at the country level with 99.8% accuracy. For IPs located within the U.S., we estimate around an 80% accuracy at the state/region level, and a 66% accuracy for cities (within a 50km radius of that city).”

Geolocation Accuracy – MaxMind

At least I get located in the right country every time :(

We are sort of running like a VPN… a 464 tunnel, actually.  Just like a VPN, it can drop you out in a completely different area than your physical location.

I am typically “homed” out of Charlotte, NC even though I live in Florence, SC.

As such, my Sling TV wants to give me local content for the Charlotte area.  Kinda annoying, but this solution is saving me a substantial amount against Spectrum's standard rates… and I was tired of haggling constantly with them for a little $10 discount here and there just to TRY to keep the cost somewhat reasonable.

Once in a blue moon I will get shot off somewhere in left field.  Sometimes a simple reboot resolves it.  Have had to do a full power down for a few minutes a couple times though.

While it isn't exactly ideal, it is one of those pros/cons things you sometimes have to deal with if you are trying to save money or otherwise just want to try an alternative option.  I miss the ability to open ports properly as well.  So far it hasn't been a critical issue, as I am not doing any multiplayer games that REQUIRE it--but if I do get around to that again, I will likely have to go back to Spectrum on their intro rate if TMO doesn't figure out a better way to do dual-stack IP's.

I have to weigh my need to access sites which require me to be in my state in order to use the websites versus savings $10 a month. This is only my 2nd day of their service.

Revivalofthesoul wrote:

I have to weigh my need to access sites which require me to be in my state in order to use the websites versus savings $10 a month. This is only my 2nd day of their service.

Good luck!  In West Virginia, I always get an IP for Pennsylvania.  It is drawback for any streaming services that offer locals but don't expect T-Mobile to change how their service works and where their backbones are for network connectivity just to provide local IP addresses.  

I use fuboTV and using T-mobile home internet they will not provide you a local IP address, so a service like fubo will check your public IP to determine where you are, so I am getting local channels.

I contact the support they say that I need to speak with fubo, and that is not the case. fubo has an api to check what is your IP address that is api.fubo.tv/v3/location the same they use in their code to check your location and my IP returns not on my region,

But I am a point I can’t spectrum anymore, for local channel I am getting VHF/UHF/HD 4K antenna to at least get the local channels.

I would prefer that the support is more direct and honest and just say we don't provide local IP addresses, but for the price of internet and fubo TV it is enough a good reason for me to drop the spectrum monopoly. I try so hard with spectrum to try to make the price of TV+internet the same as t-mobile plus fubo, but that was an even impossible task, I lost my hope and patience.

If wasn't for the issue of local IP, I was going to be 100% satisfied with t-mobile hoem internet, but I hope they fix it at some point. On the mean time an antenna is coming my way.

May want to look into what Vidgo has to offer.  I was able to do a test run of the service a week or so back to confirm it works with TMO-HI, and it worked fine for us.  I am getting the key network and sports/news feeds we watch from the Sling Orange+Blue plans for a little bit less, and some of them also let me sign into the standalone apps so we don't have to us their grid UI for things like ESPN, ACC, SEC, etc.

Both Sling and Vidgo worked for us since we too have set up an antenna to serve the house with locals.  TMO is reporting us as the Charlotte, NC region instead of the Pee Dee Region (actually in Florence, SC), but that didn't prevent us from using their services--it can just cause the service to feed you some different regional content like local news/weather stuff.

YMMV of course, depending on what your needs are.  Just like Sling, they offer two plans.  The slimmer Core plan for $45 is a pretty good bang for the buck (drops some specialized channels like the PAC12 networks and such in the full plan) if you don't need those extras.  Can sign up for Core and upgrade later if you want the extras.  Their support team is pretty responsive, though it is kind of weird to not just email someone for simple questions (they use a form system to submit tickets, but once one is open you can just email back and forth from there).

This likely won’t work, but in the remote case that TMO is actually connected to a geoIP service, the location correction could be made on that side: https://support.maxmind.com/correction-faq/submit-a-correction/can-believe-maxminds-geoip-data-incorrect/

A more comical approach...TMO could use their own SyncUp Tracker to locate all these misplaced routers. : )

https://www.t-mobile.com/news/devices/syncup-tracker

I use EyeStreamTV. There's no geo restrictions. It has local channels for virtually every market as well as full sports packages and the major movie channels. I was worried when I switched from Spectrum I wouldn't have enough bandwidth, but haven't had any issues with T-Mobile Home. You can try it for free.

I installed the location guard addon on my browsers so I don't have to verify my identity everytime I log into a banking or shopping site when the cell signal switches. You can set it to a fixed location.

I'm having issues with the t-mobile geolocation with my wife's VPN. Her job requires her to connect through VPN, but the "Okta" service reroutes all her traffic to the closest VPN server from the IP she is connecting from. Although we get good bandwidth with our gateway, all traffic is being re-routed from AZ to WA or CA and that brings it to it's knees. Right is experiencing 1% of the capacity with her VPN connection because it is not local to her company in AZ. I know there are multiple DBs out there that get refreshed every week to every month on the location of the IPs by the providers, but this has to be a job of the provider, not the customer since most of us get a dynamic IP anyway.

There are several locations for customers to “fix” their IP locations:

https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-data-correction-request/

https://www.whatismyip.com/ip-address-geolocation-incorrect/

… but then again, this should not be the job of the customer since the IP given, can change at any time.

There isn't any geolocation function built into the gateways, so your location is determined by your dynamic IP address.