Please find below a list of our frequently asked questions. We don't get asked a lot of repetitive questions, but when we do they will appear here. If you cannot find the answer you are looking for then please do not hesitate to get in touch via our contact page and we'll do our best to help.
All of our products are delivered via electronic download. As soon as we have received your cleared payment we will send you a username and password to access our download area. In most cases this will be instant as our order fulfillment process is fully automated by our website.
Our datasets are generally updated every 3 months. Once you have purchased a dataset from us you will receive indefinite updates without incurring any additional surcharges. If you have been looking at other solutions then we advise you to check the update frequencies and fee schedules.
This is because you are using Eastings and Northings instead of Latitude and Longitude. It should be noted that our NI datasets are based on the Irish Grid and our GB datasets on the British Grid. The two overlap and are incompatible. If you wish to use both datasets simultaneously we recommend that you base your distance calculations on Latitude and Longitude instead of Eastings and Northings. Grid conversion methods are unreliable so we do not recommend them.
This is in fact misleading. District based calculation can be accurate to within 2-3 miles, but it can also be inaccurate by upto 70 miles. Even sector based calculation can be inaccurate by upto 30-40 miles. District and sector based distance calculation within the same district or sector is also impossible as the calculation will always be 0 miles. Determining geography is out of the question with many districts spanning more than one town, ward or even county. Take DT8 3LG - DT8 3PE in Beaminster as your classic example. Here we have 2 unit postcodes in the same district and sector seperated by a physical distance of 8.95 miles. A district containing 230 unit codes, yet spanning 6 wards and sharing borders with both the counties of Dorset and Somerset. The UK contains tens of thousands of examples like this. The problem is that we don't all of us live in the centre of a circle and postcode geography is an inconsistent minefield, which requires accuracy by large numbers.
We offer a free web API that allows you to resolve a postcode to its geographic location. I.E. Town, Ward, District, County, Region and Country. It also returns Eastings, Northings, Latitude, Longitude and the National Grid Reference. The API offers both JSON and XML responses, but is limited to 100 lookup requests per day, for each requesting IP. In order to protect our proprietary intellectual data it will also only return centroid based coordinates for the Crown Dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, though we unlock unit resolution for clients who have purchased an API Key. You can find an API integration example in the Web API Usage Guide section.