Why the Ome.tv location is wrong
Usually it is the type of connection somebody is on, not the country you are in and not a fault in the lookup. Here is how to tell which readings to trust.
- Almost always right
- Country
- Usually right
- City on home broadband
- Often the head office
- City on mobile data
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What decides whether the city is right
Including the cases where the city is close to worthless, which most pages like this leave out.
What to expect, by connection
Before anything else, find the provider name in the panel. It is the one thing that tells you how much the city underneath it is worth.
| Connection | Country | City | How far off it can be |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home fibre, cable or DSL | Right | Usually right | The same city, sometimes the next town |
| Fixed wireless | Right | Often the wrong town | Tens of kilometres |
| Mobile data, 3G to 5G | Right | Usually the provider head office | The whole country |
| Company, school or university | Right | Where the organisation registered it | The whole country |
| VPN or proxy | Wrong | Wrong | A different country |
Country and provider are the parts you can lean on
Across every row above the country is right apart from a VPN, and the provider name is right in every row without exception. Those two are the dependable readings. The city is the one that moves, because no instrument ever measured it: who decides where an IP address is.
The device tells you nothing
This is the misreading behind most reports that the location is broken. Somebody is sitting at a desktop computer, so the reading ought to be accurate. What matters is the line that computer is plugged into, and you cannot see that on camera.
A computer can be on mobile data
A mobile router, a modem with a SIM card in it, or a phone sharing its connection over Wi-Fi. The computer sits at a desk and the connection is a mobile one, so it behaves exactly like the mobile row above.
A phone can be on a home line
A phone on home Wi-Fi is using the household broadband, so it reads like a home line and the city is usually right. The same phone on mobile data an hour later reads like a mobile connection.
Two devices in one room can differ
A tablet on the house Wi-Fi and a computer on a mobile dongle are two different connections. They will give you two different answers, and neither of them is a malfunction.
Only the provider name settles it
If the panel names a mobile brand, treat the city as a rough guess no matter what the person appears to be using. If it names a broadband company, the city is worth something.
Testing with people you know is where this bites
Checking the tool against friends is a sensible thing to do, and it goes wrong when both of you assume a desktop computer means a home line. Ask which connection they are actually on before counting a reading as wrong.
Why so many addresses land on the capital
A mobile provider does not hold one address per customer. It holds a pool, and that pool has a single registered location for the entire country.
- 01
Many people share a pool
Mobile networks put very large numbers of customers behind a shared set of addresses instead of giving each person their own. The address somebody has right now is one the provider lent them, and somebody three hundred kilometres away has one from the same batch.
- 02
The batch is registered once
When the provider registers that batch, it files one location for the whole of it, and that location is the company head office. Head offices sit in capital cities and other large cities.
- 03
Every lookup service reads that filing
There is no better source underneath. Ours and every other service report what the provider filed, so a whole country of mobile customers resolves to a single point on the map.
- 04
You see a capital city
Somebody in a small town shows up as the capital. The address genuinely carries no information about where that person is, so there is nothing for the lookup to have got right.
It works this way in every country
This reaches us as a complaint about one particular country, and it never is one. A mobile connection in Poland tends to resolve to Warsaw, in Czechia to Prague, in France to Paris. If you meet a lot of mobile users you will see a lot of capital cities, wherever in the world you are sitting.
Two marks in the panel that get misread
Both of these describe how much confidence to have. Both have been reported to us as the tool failing.
The grey chip beside the provider
That is the connection type, not the provider. It reads Fiber, Cable, ADSL, Wireless, Mobile, Mixed or Unknown, and it is the quickest way to place somebody in the table above.
That chip reading Unknown
It means the connection type could not be worked out for this address, which is common and harmless. The provider name printed beside it is still correct. It does not mean the provider is unknown.
Location accuracy: Insufficient
That bar is a community score for the provider, built from member ratings. Insufficient means fewer than six members have rated this provider so far, so no score is shown yet. It is not a verdict on the reading in front of you.
The score exists because members build it
The two rating buttons beside that bar are the only reason there is a score at all. When you can tell that a reading was right or wrong, rating it feeds the score for that provider for everybody who meets it afterwards. Providers in smaller countries carry the fewest ratings, which is exactly where a handful of votes changes the most. Rating is a VIP feature.
Reading it for what it reliably says
Lean on country and provider
Those two are right almost every time. Most of what people actually want here, which is a sense of who they are talking to and whether the connection is a genuine home one, comes from those rather than from the city.
Read the connection type first
One glance at the chip tells you whether the city under it is worth reading at all. On a mobile connection, go straight past the city.
Treat the map pin as an area
Even on a good home connection the pin lands on network equipment serving a district, never on a building. A neighbourhood is the most it can honestly mean.
Questions we get about this
It shows the capital city for nearly everybody I meet. Is something broken?
Almost certainly not. Look at the connection type chip on those readings. If it says Mobile, or the provider is a mobile brand, this is the shared pool described above, and every lookup service in the world returns the same answer for those addresses.
Is this worse in my country than in others?
Two things change between countries: how many people use mobile connections rather than home broadband, and how much detail local providers file about their address ranges. So some countries do produce vaguer readings than others. The mechanism is identical everywhere, and no country gets accurate cities out of mobile addresses.
My friend is at a desktop computer and it is still wrong.
Ask what that computer is connected to. A mobile router or a shared phone connection is very common and puts a desktop squarely in the mobile row. If it is genuinely home broadband and the city is still far out, that one is worth sending to us with a screenshot.
Can you make it more accurate?
Not for mobile and VPN addresses, because the information is not in the address to begin with and nothing can extract what was never there. Where we can improve is in how clearly the panel tells you which case you are looking at, which is what the connection type chip and the provider score are for.
It got somebody almost exactly right once. How?
Some home providers file their address ranges in detail, down to the local exchange serving a few streets. Meet somebody on one of those and the reading lands very close. That is the best case rather than the normal one, and you cannot tell in advance which providers file that way.
Would paying for VIP make the location more accurate?
No, and we would rather say so before you buy. Country, city, provider, coordinates and the map are identical on a free account and on VIP. VIP adds the VPN and datacentre warning, automatic skipping, searchable history, notes and provider scores. None of those change how precisely an address resolves.
Still stuck?
Tell us which browser you are on, whether you use the extension or paste the script, and what you see on screen. Those three things save a whole round of questions.