I live in a well known city of almost 300k people and it can't locate my city and the lat/lon is the center of the US.
Unfortunately, it's never going to be a 100%. If it's not able to pin you exactly it'll place your location as the center of the population. If you're okay with sending your IP and location to an internet stranger my email is jonathan at ipdata dot co. I can keep tabs on this and see if accuracy improves.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it's got me pegged 571 miles from my actual location. Not even close enough for an ICBM.
I'm going to paste my reply to dewski above, Unfortunately, it's never going to be a 100%. If it's not able to pin you exactly it'll place your location as the center of the population. If you could send me your location and ip address at jonathan at ipdata dot co. I can keep tabs on this and see if accuracy improves.
It's precisely the same as Maxmind for me -- about 50 miles off. GeoLiteCity.dat.gz is about 11 megabytes, i.e. one penny on a cell connection. I'm not sure how this makes sense as a business, since the value in a geolocation database lies in having cars constantly driving around sniffing people's IPs.
This is really important. Particularly because Maxmind can be used locally and their free dataset is actually pretty accurate for most use cases.
Agree. Nothing beats running it locally in regards to latency constraints.
Please see my reply to mywittyname above, basically, there are certain situations where being able to take advantage of our globally distributed infrastructure is the best call and I 100% agree that there are situations where using a local db is simply the best (only) call.