[preinheimer]

I'm a co-founder at WonderProxy, we didn't make their list (we target people doing application testing, not consumer VPNs).

We're in 100+ countries, and I'll stand by that claim. It's a huge pain in the neck. In our early years we had a lot of problems with suppliers claiming to be in Mexico or South America who were actually just in Texas. I almost flew to Peru with a rackmount server in my luggage after weeks of problems, that plan died when we realized I'd need to figure out how to pay Peruvian income tax on the money I made in country before I could leave.

We've also had customers complaining that a given competitor had a country we'd had trouble sourcing in the Middle East. A little digging on our part and it's less than a ms away from our server in Germany.

[reincoder]

I work for IPinfo. I have raised a ticket internally, but I think we focused on consumer VPNs for this test.

For our ProbeNet, we are attempting to reach 150 countries (by ISO 3166's definition). We are at around 530 cities. Server management is not an easy task. We do not ship hardware, but operate using dedicated servers, so this reduces one layer of complexity.

To maintain the authenticity of our server locations, we utilize cross-pings and network traffic behavior detection. If any abnormality is detected, the server will be immediately disabled to prevent polluting our data. There will be a ticket to investigate what went wrong.

We pay for each (excluding 3 to 4 servers where the owner and the team really likes us and insists on sponsoring) server. Expansion is an active effort for us, as there are 70k ASNs and about 100 more countries where we do not have a server.

We hope to partner with more ASNs, particularly residential ISPs and IXPs. So, a lot of effort is put into active outreach through WhatsApp, emails, social media and phone calls. We use a number of different data-based techniques to identify "leads".

[laz]

Google, Apple, and Meta (maybe others?) have the data to build a complete GeoIP dataset. None of them will share because there are only downsides to doing so.

When FB was rolling out ipv6 in 2012, well meaning engineers proposed releasing a v6 only GeoIP db (at the time, the public dbs were shit). Not surprisingly, it was shot down.

[preinheimer]

We really don't want to operate our own hardware. The situation in Peru at the time was that there wasn't anyone offering the bandwidth we needed who could actually back up their bandwidth claims. Forget 95th percentile, bandwidth there was straight "you pay for a pipe, we give you that size pipe (but somewhat oversold)". But no one could do more than like 5mbit that was actually more like 3.

[Youden]

Could you use RIPE Atlas and its network of probes, at least to fill in areas where it's difficult to get your own probes?

That way everyone benefits.