But for the rest of us, a more relevant question might be:what is an IP address?
Across the globe, there are billions of computing devices that connect to the internet.
To communicate, each machine needs an address, just like our homes.
Our home address is typically structured along the lines of number, street, city, postcode, country.
And our entire postal delivery online grid is based on this system.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Our digital world is similar and has an address system that allows internet traffic to move around the internet.
Since its inception, IP was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind.
So the complete IP address space ranges from 0.0.0.0 through to 255.255.255.255.
See an example below, using the IP address of one of the servers that hosts theconversation.com.
Not all addresses are available for use by anyone.
Many arereservedfor specific purposes.
Other large blocks of addresses areassigned to specific organizations.
The US Department of Defense owns the 6 prefix (6.x.y.z), as well as 11 others.
For now, IPv4 is still here.
But its demise has long beenpredictedand it will eventually no longer be fit for purpose.
There are technical solutions, however.
Although IPv6 is newer than IPv4, it isnt really new.
It was originally proposed some25 years ago.
Version 6 also boosts the total number of unique IP addresses on offer, up to some 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.
Even with the rapid rise in equipment usage, this address pool shouldlast us a long time.
But private addresses cant be used on the internet, so these devices hide behind one public/external IP address.
This public address is capable of supporting up to hundreds of thousands of devices for a large organization.
But a router is needed to connect the connection to the internet.
The process of routing many devices through a single IP address is called nesting networks.
And the technique it uses is referred to as internet Address Translation (NAT).
IP and download speeds
You probably wont be using IP addresses in your daily life.
But so that access a website, our computers need to lookup the IP address for that site.
This all happens in the background.
In the image above, youll notice four different addresses.
This allows the servers delivering the content to distribute the workload between four servers.
Some websites go further and use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
CDNs host copies of web content in servers around the globe.
This reduces the time it takes to load the page.
Fortunately, even with this predicted explosion, IPv4 at home will be able to cope.
If you want to check your private IP address, this will take alittle more effort.
