What Are Private IP Addresses?
What Is a Private IP Address?
Every Internet-connected device has an IP address. Within each home or business network, devices connect to the Internet and to each other using those IP addresses. Private IP addresses within the three different private IP address ranges are what keeps connections between devices working successfully.
A private IP address is an IP assigned to devices on private networks. These types of IPs, also referred to as local IP addresses or internal IP addresses, are used on local area networks (LANs) like your home network. These blocks are reserved for private IP addresses only by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
There are two types of IP address: IPv4 and IPv6. Originally, private IP addresses were created in order to help delay the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, as there is a limited number of IPv4 addresses. But even with the theoretical 4,294,967,296 addresses created by the 32-bit system, IPv4 address space began to run low with the amount of new Internet-connected devices that came into businesses and homes.
Thus, private IP addresses allowed private networks to use the same IP addresses internally without causing conflicts for public IP addresses. Though IPv6 addresses ended up being the solution to IPv4 exhaustion, the private IP address system still exists for internal networks.
Thousands of WiFi routers use internal IP addresses. Networks are able to do this without conflict because the router creates a private network, preventing external users from seeing the internal IP addresses assigned. Each device within a network has a private IP address. Additionally, all those devices operate under one public IP address, which is typically the IP of the router. You can view your public IP address on the What Is My IP site homepage, but finding your private – or local – IP address requires a few extra steps,
There are several common internal IP addresses used for home networks and routers: 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.254, 192.168.100.1, 192.168.12.1, and 10.0.0.1 are a few of the most frequently-used.
The router assigns local IP addresses to devices on a network that connect to WiFi. When a connected device makes a request to a website, the router directs the traffic accordingly, both externally through your Internet service connection and internally back to the device that made the request via Network Address Translation (NAT).
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