[clug] OT: Location from IP

[Brett Worth]

Between 8pm and 8:30pm I had problem connecting to the 'net.  I connect via Transact and 
Velocity (NetSpeed) so I thought I might be able to get on-line with tethering to my 
Testra attached mobile.  This sort of worked but was also having major problems so I just 
waited on the terrestrial link until it all came back 30 minutes later.

This made me reminisce about the olden days when you'd  get an email from your ISP when an 
outage occurred telling you what happened.  Hmmm... that was good.

I then did a bit of googling in search of somewhere I might find Internet status from 
somebody - anybody - when this kind of things happens.  During my quest I stumbled upon 
this telstra page:

  http://servicestatus.telstra.com/servicestatus/goc.do?q=technology.html&service=Internet

Just for fun I clicked the "Allow Location" when chrome asked for permission to send it. 
It then gave me a "No Problems Found" response along with a lat-long in a text box.  This 
I plugged into google maps and got a marker that was within 30M of where I'm now sitting!

How does that work?  I do have a fixed IP but I can't see how that gets to a location.  It 
wasn't from my address because it actually pointed to a neighbour's place.  How would 
Chrome even know what to say when asked?

Does that mean that Telstra knows approximately where all the Transact/Netspeed/IInet end 
points are?  Or is the information in Chrome?

Brett
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