A static IP makes it easier to host servers or to offer remote access on a closed network.Some of the benefits of using static IP addresses as a large organization are: When you connect to the internet via a static IP address, that IP will stay the same no matter how many times you reset the connection or the router. Getting a static IP address means leasing that IP address for a period of time until the contract ends. Static IPs are usually used by bigger organizations or networks administrators and they are assigned upon request. One is static, as in - it doesn’t change, and one is dynamic, as in - it does change. The difference between static IP addresses and dynamic IP addresses is quite simple. We’ll go over how static and dynamic IP addresses work in the following chapters. There are two types of IP addresses, static and dynamic, which can be either public or private. For example, 10.0.0.0/8 is reserved for private use and 92.0.0.0/24 is reserved for IETF Protocol Assignments. Then, the IP addresses are distributed to companies like ISPs (Internet Service Providers), who assign unique IP addresses to their clients.Ĭertain blocks of IP addresses are reserved by IANA for specific functions or for future use. The IANA distributes the IP addresses to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), one of them being ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers). From there, the IP addresses reach IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which is a function of ICANN and which is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other internet protocol resources. So, ICANN is the initial owner of every IP address. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the one responsible for creating and distributing IP addresses. But who owns the IP addresses and who distributes them? To understand more about how IP addressed are used, let’s take a look into how they are assigned.Įvery device that connects to the internet has its own, unique IP address. In this case, each device’s IP address will have the same network ID, but each with a different host ID. In this example, the host ID would be 35.įor example, in your house, you can have more devices connected to the same network. The Host ID: The last group of digits from the IP address labels the specific device.It marks the network the devices are connected to. The Network ID: The Network ID represents the first three groups of digits from the IP address.All the devices that are connected to the internet, use the same protocol to communicate with each other. The communication system for the internet is TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Same as people use a certain language to understand each other, the information is sent over the internet in a specific language, following a specific set of guidelines. IPv6 can foster a maximum of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IPs.Īll the devices that are connected to the internet (including PCs, laptops, smartphones, routers, and WiFi connected devices) are assigned a unique identifier (IP address). While IPv4 has limitations when it comes to the number of supported IPs, the IPv6 protocol will, theoretically, never run out of IP addresses. IPv6 was intended to replace the IPv4 because of its number of IP addresses limitations. If there are groups composed of four zeros, they can be replaced with one colon to simplify the string.Įxample or IPv6 address: 2004:0ef7:0000:0043:0000:6b3a:0270:7445Įven though the IPv6 protocol was designed in 1999 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), it only became an internet standard in 2017. IPv6 (or IP version 6) uses 128-bit addresses that are composed of eight groups of hexadecimal digits separated by colons (known as hexadecimal notation). And because the number of devices increased exponentially over time, IPv4 couldn’t support all of them so an additional method needed to be implemented. The IPv4 supports a maximum of around 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. It is still the most used protocol to this day, despite the deployment of its successor IPv6. IPv4 (or IP version 4) is a protocol that uses 32-bit addresses that are composed of four numbers (or four octets) separated by dots (known as dotted decimal notation). There are two standards for IP addresses: IPv4 and IPv6.