is one that I used (at least in demo mode), and it is much better than most. But it isn't cheap.
There are more folks out there -- they end up being used by fraud-prevention outfits by filtering out IPs from places with known credit card abuse issues.
I'm using hostip.info for my small project http://newshoured.com/ and it seems to work for nearly everyone I've asked. It's also got a dead simple API. Note: the population of people I've asked is < 20, and it did fail the iPhone test, which I assumed it would.
It really isn't just AOL. I live in east Alabama, and geolocation of my IP almost always puts me in a suburb of Atlanta (except for the few that put me in Miami... not sure what's up with that) because I use an AT&T (Bellsouth) DSL line.
However:
http://www.hostip.info/
is a free service that relies on its users putting their own data in. A wiki like mechanism, if you will.
http://www.geody.com/geoip.php
appears to work, but I'd worry about their TOS.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip
is one that I used (at least in demo mode), and it is much better than most. But it isn't cheap.
There are more folks out there -- they end up being used by fraud-prevention outfits by filtering out IPs from places with known credit card abuse issues.