IP Lookup Canada

Finding Out Who Owns an IP Address

Every public IP address on the internet is allocated to an organization by one of five Regional Internet Registries. For Canada, that's ARIN. Ownership data is published openly via the modern RDAP protocol and the older WHOIS protocol.

What ownership data includes

• Registrant organization: the entity that holds the IP block (e.g. Rogers, Bell, OVH Hosting)
• ASN (Autonomous System Number): the network operator that routes the IP on the internet
• CIDR block: the range of IP addresses owned together
• Abuse contact email: required for reporting spam, attacks, or policy violations
• Allocation history: when the block was assigned and last modified

Ownership lookups are the standard tool for tracing the company behind a server. They're used routinely for abuse reporting, network engineering, and cybersecurity investigations. For domain-level ownership data (registrar, expiry, contact info, rather than IP block ownership), our domain WHOIS lookup tool handles that side of the lookup.

Detecting VPNs, Proxies and Hosting IPs

VPN providers, proxy networks, Tor exit nodes, and commercial hosting providers all have IP ranges that can be identified with the right datasets. A general-purpose IP lookup will surface a few useful clues:

• ASN belongs to a hosting company (DigitalOcean, OVH, AWS): strong signal the IP isn't a residential connection
• Reverse DNS looks like data centre infrastructure (e.g. server-01.dal.linode.com)
• Registry data lists the owner as a known VPN provider: common with NordVPN, Mullvad, ExpressVPN ranges
• Geolocation mismatch with browser timezone or language: a Canadian-language browser session coming from a Romanian IP suggests a VPN

IPv6 Address Lookups

IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long and written in eight groups of four hex characters, like 2606:4700:4700::1111. Every lookup our tool performs works identically for IPv4 and IPv6. Geolocation, RDAP, reverse DNS, and ASN data all return the same fields.

Key differences from IPv4

• 340 undecillion possible addresses, vs. 4.3 billion for IPv4. The pool is effectively unlimited.
• Reverse DNS uses .ip6.arpa instead of .in-addr.arpa
• RDAP works identically: same protocol, same servers, just different address format
• Geolocation accuracy is generally lower: IPv6 allocations are younger and less geographically tagged

Canada has unusually high IPv6 adoption, at around 59% of Canadian networks. Google's IPv6 statistics and APNIC's per-country measurements both rank Canada in the top ten globally.

RDAP vs WHOIS: What's the Difference?

WHOIS is the original protocol for querying IP and domain ownership, dating to 1982. It returns plain text in inconsistent formats. Every registry's response looks different. RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the modern replacement: it returns structured JSON, runs over HTTPS, and follows a consistent schema across all five Regional Internet Registries.

Why this tool prefers RDAP

• Structured data: reliable parsing, no regex guesswork
• Standardized fields: same response shape from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC
• HTTPS by default: replaces unencrypted port-43 WHOIS
• Internationalization: proper UTF-8 support for non-Latin character sets
• Faster: JSON over HTTP/2 versus a TCP socket per query

WHOIS is still used as a fallback when RDAP isn't available for a particular registry or top-level domain. The IANA bootstrap registry publishes the mapping of which registry serves which IP range or TLD.