What Is My IP
The IP address of your device's network is a numerical address, it is a collection of criteria that acts as a method of identifying your device on the internet.
What Is An IP Address?
The Internet Protocol Address (or IP Address) is a one-of-a-kind address used by computing devices such as personal computers, tablets, and smartphones to identify themselves and connect with other devices on the IP network. Any IP network-connected device must have a unique IP address within the network. An IP address, like a physical address or a phone number, is used to uniquely identify an entity.
The structural composition of an IPv4 consists of four eight binary digits separated by a decimal point. These addresses, however, are primarily stated in dot-decimal format. As an example:
Dot-decimal: 172.217.168.238
Binary: 10010111.01100101.00000000.01010100
Public and Private IP Addresses
To minimize address conflicts, IP addresses are publicly registered with the Network Information Center (NIC) in order to maintain uniqueness within the global namespace. Devices that must be publicly identifiable, such as web or mail servers, must have a globally unique IP address, which is allocated to them. Devices that do not need public access can be allocated a private IP address, making them uniquely recognizable within a single enterprise.
A network printer, for example, may be assigned a private IP address to prohibit the rest of the world from printing from it. The NIC has designated specific address blocks for private use to allow enterprises to freely allocate private IP addresses. A private network is one that employs the RFC 1918 IP address space. The following IP addresses are designated for private use.
What Is A Public IP Address?
Your Internet Service Provider assigns public IP addresses (ISP). The IP address is what allows you to connect to the internet and surf the web. Every device on a local network has the same public IP address since the router has the same IP address. That is, even if your smart TV's IP address is 192.168.1.31 and your PC's IP address is 192.168.1.68, the public IP address assigned to both devices will be the same, such as 123.45.67.89.
When the internet originally became available, there were only a few servers. People would connect to those servers using the IP addresses that had been issued to them. However, when the internet grew in size, specialists developed Domain Name Services (DNS) to assign a human-readable label to IP numbers, allowing users to easily remember and reach desired servers.
Dynamic and static IP addresses are the two types of public IP addresses. Hundreds of thousands of people share dynamic IP addresses. It frequently switches between users as they restart their routers or when their DHCP lease expires. In contrast, static or dedicated IP addresses do not change even if the router or modem is restarted.
Differences Between IPv4 and IPv6 Addresses
When IPv4 was first announced, it was thought that there would be an infinite number of addresses available. They were mistaken. IPv6 was developed to address the shortfall. Apart from providing an infinite number of IP addresses, IPv6 differs from IPv4 for a variety of other reasons.
How Does An IP Address look Like?
There are two common IP address standards: IPv4 (IP Version 4) and IPv6 (IP Version 6), which will eventually replace IPv4.
IPv4 address uses 32 binary bits and contains from 4 to 12 digits, 4 numbers separated by dots.
Examples: 8.8.4.4, 188.100.210.213
IPv6 address uses 128 binary bits and can contain up to 45 characters (8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits separated by 6 colons). Groups with all zeros can be shortened for the simplicity of the representation.
Example: 2001:4860:4860::8888 (expanded – 2001:4860:4860:0000:0000:0000:0000:8888)