2.4% of AFRINIC’s IPv4 addresses answer from outside Africa, and about 81% of those sit in one company’s four blocks

I work at IPinfo and this one started with a simple question: if a registry says an address is African, is it actually in Africa? This started as work for a paper by our research team (WHEREIS, IMC 2026). We tested it with ping times. Light in fiber only travels so far in a millisecond, so a fast reply puts a hard limit on how far away an address can be. Most registries pass, but AFRINIC is the exception: 2.4% of the addresses we could measure answer from outside Africa. And about 81% of those are in just four blocks, held by one company. What surprised me most while writing this is that the registries’ own files still list 98.6% of them as African. So anything that blocks or allows traffic by registry country gets these wrong. The numbers are a minimum, and anycast is left out. submitted by /u/seremot [link] [comments]Technical Information Security Content & DiscussionRead More