Do your visitors come from the UK, France or Germany? Which company are they from? Which search engine did they use? The origin of your visitors helps to define the content that your website provides or the areas to target a Direct Mail campaign. It can even be a factor in your company's geographical location. Nedstat recognises the importance of this information. The extensive monitoring and updating of our own IP database reflects this.
At the moment, they have more than 900,000 IP ranges (between one and ten thousand IP addresses) registered, which make the IP database the largest of its kind.
A further complication is that Netscape 4, from what I remember, just used en for english. IN that case I used to get the timezone from the browser setting to separate US from UK.
These browser settings are available from javascript (or server-side ASP)