Starlink IP location wrong? Why sites put you in a hub city
Satellite traffic joins the wider internet in a hub city. Starlink’s own published data says so, which is why “Dallas” can be the right answer for a farm in Oklahoma.
On this page
Starlink publishes a geofeed, the standard file ISPs use to tell location databases where each address block is used. On 5 October 2026 it listed 4,352 blocks across 320 city names such as Dallas, Miami, Seattle and Denver. Databases that follow it will place you in that hub city, not at home. You can’t change the hub; you can make sure the site uses your device location or account settings instead.
What Starlink itself publishes
Starlink publishes a geofeed at geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv.[1] A geofeed is the format defined in RFC 8805: one line per address block, with country, region and city, published by the network that operates the addresses so that geolocation databases can use it.[2]
The first lines of the file on our check date looked like this:
9.161.128.0/24,US,US-TX,Dallas,
9.161.129.0/24,US,US-TX,Dallas,
9.161.130.0/24,US,US-TX,Dallas,On 5 October 2026 the file had 4,352 lines and 320 distinct city names. Every line named a city; none named a postal code. In the United States the most common entries were Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago.[1]
Why a hub city and not your home
Satellite internet traffic has to come down to the ground and join the rest of the internet somewhere. Your public address belongs to the block used where that happens, and Starlink’s feed tells databases to place the block in that city. So when a site says you are in Dallas, a database following the feed is doing exactly what the operator asked.
RFC 8805 also gives the operator room to be coarse on purpose: publishers decide what to make public and may leave fields out “to further protect privacy”.[2]
What you can change
| Situation | What helps |
|---|---|
| A site shows the hub city and that’s fine for you | Nothing to do: the hub is the documented location |
| A site shows the wrong country | Report it to the site and to the database vendor; country errors are worth fixing |
| A site needs your real area (weather, local news, delivery) | Allow device location, or set your location in the site’s account settings |
| A database ignores the feed and shows somewhere else entirely | A correction to that vendor, citing Starlink’s feed for your block |
When you file a correction, expect limits. MaxMind warns that if you correct your own address, it “may be frequently reallocated or shared with other people who are spread out over a large geographic area”.[4] That is especially true when your address is one of many in a hub block.
See the city each source gives you
Compare the hub city in the databases with the country and region they report.
Open the Truth CheckHow databases find the feed
RFC 9632 describes how a database finds an operator’s geofeed: through a geofeed: attribute or a remarks: Geofeed https://… line in the registry record for the address block, with the file served over HTTPS.[3] Not every registry record points to a feed, and databases are free to weigh it against their own data, which is why two sites can still disagree about you.
Sources
- Starlink geofeed (RFC 8805 CSV, 4,352 lines on the check date) · StarlinkChecked 5 Oct 2026
- RFC 8805: A Format for Self-Published IP Geolocation Feeds (Aug 2020) · IETF / RFC EditorChecked 5 Oct 2026
- RFC 9632: Finding and Using Geofeed Data (Aug 2024) · IETF / RFC EditorChecked 5 Oct 2026
- GeoIP location correction · MaxMindChecked 5 Oct 2026