GeoIP Legacy Databases have been Retired
It’s the end of an era! For 20 years, MaxMind has provided IP geolocation data under the GeoIP brand with the Legacy .DAT database format. With the help of our customers, we helped democratize the IP intelligence industry, bringing accessible IP geolocation data to tens of thousands of businesses.
GeoIP2 and the introduction of IPv6
A lot has changed about the internet over the last 20 years, and the Legacy format could no longer keep pace with the extraordinary changes that the 21st century has brought. The biggest of these changes was the adoption of the IPv6 format.
The GeoIP Legacy format was built for the IPv4 world, which allows for roughly 4.2 billion unique IP addresses, but the new IPv6 standard allows for 3.4 x 1038 (roughly 340 trillion trillion trillion) addresses. There’s a hard limit to how much IP coverage and precision the GeoIP Legacy format could reasonably support, and over the last ten years we’ve watched IPv6 adoption grow so that today Google estimates that it is responsible for 35% of internet traffic .
By using our modern GeoIP2 MaxMind DB (MMDB) file format, you can quickly query any IPv4 or IPv6 address and get access to our up to date IP geolocation and intelligence data.
Transitioning to GeoIP2
If you’re still in the process of transitioning from GeoIP Legacy to GeoIP2, you can get more information in the blog post announcing the retirement of our Legacy databases from 2020 .
GeoIP Legacy Web Services
In addition to the retirement of our GeoIP Legacy databases, there have been some important data changes to minFraud and GeoIP Legacy web services. The most notable of these is the change in our region codes, and the move to GeoNames for standardized location names.
You can read about all the changes to our Legacy web services on our blog post announcing these changes .
Thank you for 20 years of GeoIP
We look forward to continuing to serve our customers with industry-leading IP intelligence data and tools under the GeoIP brand for another twenty years!