Friday, June 19, 2009

AT&T Wireless - Reports people in Florida when Not

AT&T Wireless reports people as logging in from Florida using their laptop connect cards when they are at the opposite side of the country. You'd think with all the work on with GPS and the government mandate regarding pinpointing people's locations when they are on cell phones for 911 calls that they would also accurately pinpoint locations when using laptop connect cards.

This is the network you get when you look up the associated IP addresses:

OrgName: AT&T Global Network Services, LLC
OrgID: ATGS
Address: 3200 Lake Emma Road
City: Lake Mary
StateProv: FL
PostalCode: 32746
Country: US

NetRange: 32.0.0.0 - 32.255.255.255

Perhaps this is for security reasons or otherwise, I'm not sure, but if they are serving up an IP in LA or Seattle it seems like they could pull it from an associated IP range mapped to that city so locations can be accurately reported in logs.

This is like AOLs IP address reporting which basically does the same thing. Everyone is in Virginia according to their IP ranges.