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How many people are represented by a single IP address? How do you deal with changing IP addresses (most residential ISPs assign dynamic addresses)? How do you
by oxguy3 9y ago
How many people are represented by a single IP address? How do you deal with changing IP addresses (most residential ISPs assign dynamic addresses)? How do you distinguish between residential and commercial traffic? How do you deal with cellular devices (for which GeoIP data is much less accurate)? How do you account for people who don't use the service you got the data from? (Netflix in particular has a limited subscriber base, but all the providers would exclude, say, elderly folks who do nothing but email).
Getting good data at nationwide scale is never as easy as it sounds in your head, unfortunately.
- dboreham 9y agoAll good questions: 1. Typically a single IP address represents a single connection. Yes there are providers who NAT multiple subscribers onto one IP but they are rare (because if they do that then they have to maintain NAT logs in order to identify criminal subscribers to law enforcement -- easier to just have 1:1 IP to subscriber). 2. Residential addresses are in fact not really dynamic. Yes they can change from time to time but for the most part they don't (see #1). 3. Cellular traffic can be identified because the cell carriers use specific identifiable netblocks. 4. It doesn't matter if not everyone uses the sampling service because that's the point of sampling.