But in order to access a website, our computers need to “lookup” the IP address for that site. You probably won’t be using IP addresses in your daily life. When data is delivered to a private organization or home network, the router forwards the traffic to a specific internal computer using that computer’s private IP address. And the technique it uses is referred to as Network Address Translation (NAT). The process of routing many devices through a single IP address is called “nesting” networks. You cannot trace an address to this network remotely! xkcd Private address spaces often use the 192.168 prefix. The router translates the many internal private addresses which are hiding behind the public IP address (or several of them). But a router is needed to connect the network to the internet. This public address is capable of supporting up to hundreds of thousands of devices for a large organization. But private addresses can’t be used on the internet, so these devices “hide” behind one public/external IP address. While IPv6 contains an unimaginable number of assignable addresses, as technology evolves we may well reach address exhaustion again! xkcd Making efficient use of addressesĪs mentioned above, private addresses can be used for individual devices inside an organization (or home). Even with the rapid rise in device usage, this address pool should last us a long time. The most significant change with IPv6 is the increase in the size of IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits. The shift to IPv6 brings a range of benefits, even if they are basically transparent as far as consumers are concerned. It was originally proposed some 25 years ago. Although IPv6 is newer than IPv4, it isn’t really “new”. The most useful ones are Network Address Translation (more on this later) and a newer version of IP: version 6. But its demise has long been predicted and it will eventually no longer be fit for purpose. Dating back to the 1980s, it has a capacity of more than four billion unique addresses - which was considered enough back then.īut a combination of wasteful use (such as organizations being allocated larger IP address spaces than they need), and the exponential increase of users, is causing this space to run out.įor now, IPv4 is still here. IPv4 (version 4) is the most widely used version of IP in the world right now. The US Department of Defense “owns” the “6” prefix (6.x.y.z), as well as 11 others. Other large blocks of addresses are assigned to specific organizations. Not all addresses are available for use by anyone. IP addresses are centrally managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which delegates to one of five regional registries: Africa, America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Europe-West/Central Asia. See an example below, using the IP address of one of the servers that hosts .Įxamples of the same IP address in three different notations. So the complete IP address space ranges from 0.0.0.0 through to 255.255.255.255. The address is typically grouped as four 8-bit numbers, so each number is eight digits that are either a 1 or 0.īut we usually view IP addresses in a decimal format, wherein the value between 00000000-11111111 becomes a number between 0 and 255. That’s why it has remained effective at handling internet traffic, starting on a network with four nodes in the late 1960s, to billions of devices today.Īn IP address is a number in binary format, which means it has 32 digits (or bits) comprising 1s and 0s. Since its inception, IP was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. The recipient could be a single device such as a laptop, phone, tablet, or even your air-conditioner controller - but could also be a network entry point to a large organization. An online content delivery systemĪkin to postal addresses, IP addresses are assigned to each recipient in a worldwide infrastructure. So, an IP (internet protocol) address - which also has its own implicit structure - is fundamentally a numeric address for an endpoint on the internet. Our digital world is similar and has an address system that allows network traffic to move around the internet. And our entire postal delivery network is based on this system. Our home address is typically structured along the lines of “number, street, city, postcode, country”.

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