Companies use this kind of system to cater to the language, currency and legal requirements of their international users, as well as to provide localized content, without having to ask the user where they are based. CDN customers could use the service to reduce the risk of infringing on syndication rights on a video stream, for example.
Making an educated guess about which country or metropolitan area a user is coming in from based on knowledge of IP address allocation and other factors is a feature that Mirror Images rivals including Akamai Technologies Inc and Cable & Wireless Plc have had for some years.
Mirror Image said the Digital Envoy system, integrated into its Content Access Point network of edge servers and named GeoData, gives 99% accuracy at pinpointing a session’s country of origin. The accuracy drops to around 94% or above when estimating which city a user is in.
Source: Computerwire
