I’m puzzled. Am I being connected to/through the country I choose, or not?
I often check my IP geolocation after connecting my VPN, just to ensure it’s working. I usually choose Brunei or Panama. When checking, I get varying results depending on which IP address lookup site I use.
Currently, my VPN is set to Brunei.
showmyip[.]com says it is actually connected to Brunei.
whatismyipaddress[.]com, whatismyip[.]com, and infosniper[.]net all say it’s in Madrid, Spain.
whatisipmyaddress[.]com switches from Brunei to Frankfurt, Germany and back again.
ip-address-lookup-v4[.]com and geodatatool[.]com say Lisbon, Portugal.
All showing the same IP number.
When I choose Panama, I usually get Netherlands, but one day recently I got Ohio.
When using my previous VPN service, before it was bought out by a larger competitor, every IP lookup I did said I was connected to the country I asked it to connect to/through.
This makes no sense to me. Any information or advice would be much appreciated.
The Internet itself doesn’t know and doesn’t care about physical location. All the Internet and the routers cares about is connections and routes.
The registries that hand out IP Addresses only care about billing address and abuse email address. This is all you will see in WHOIS.
But in spite of that some websites insist on “knowing” a location.
So websites pay companies to GUESS locations of IP Addresses.
Each company has their own guesses. These independent guesses frequently don’t match.
IP Address Lookup | Geolocation will show you the guesses from eight different companies. That isn’t all the companies, nor does it include sites like Google and Facebook and others that generate their own guesses.
Only the actual owner of an IP Address knows it’s physical location - ISP, corporation, etc. And they are not obligated to tell anyone except by court order.
The actual owner of an IP Address can tell a geolocation company to say anything. VPNs create “virtual servers” this way. Most VPNs don’t have physical servers in India or South Korea or many other countries because of the oppressive local laws - they put servers somewhere else and tell the geolocation companies what to say. The VPN companies also do this simply to reduce expenses - it is less expensive to have a rack of 10 servers in one data center than the costs associated with putting one server in 10 data centers.
The actual owner of an IP Address can publish anything they want in an RFC 8805 Geolocation Feed.
Oh, and just because you obtained IP Addresses from a registry in one country, doesn’t mean you can only use those IP Addresses in that country. At work we use our ARIN allocation in 8 different countries.
When the location is wrong, report it to the VPN company for them to try to fix.