What does a 192.168 IP address mean?

Answer 1

Back in 1996 the guys over at The internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) had to decide what range of IPv4 addresses they could give away for internal use, meaning that these IP addresses would be assigned only to devices in closed networks and would not be available on the public internet.

Why would they do that exactly? The main reason is a limited number of IP addresses. 4,294,967,296 to be exact. If all internet-enabled devices would have their own unique IP address we would have ran out of them a long time ago.

Together with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), they have reserved three "blocks" of the IP address space for private networks:

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (Class A)

172.16.00 - 172.31.255.255 (Class B)

192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (Class C)

Depending on how large your network is, you would choose from one of these network classes. Class A gives you 16,777,216 IP addresses, Class B - 1,048,576 and class C 65,536.

Since we are talking about private home networks, I don't think you would even come close to connecting 50 different devices at the same time to one router. And, the smaller the network, the less problems it will cause.

For this reason, most Broadband routers have an even smaller range of IP addresses: 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.255. This means that you can connect up to 254 devices to your network (254 + 1 router). That should be enough for most people

Answer 2

IP addresses of the form 192.168.x.y (where x and y are numbers between 0 and 255) represent the addresses of your home network and not your Internet IP Addresses. There are many websites through which you can know your IP address. Eg. - whatismyipaddress[dot]com.

Answer 3

It is a private IP address rather than a public IP address and usable on the Internet. What it represents is the IP address of a computer, printer, or other device that is on a private network (whether at home, in a business, or other such environment in which communication is to remain local rather than getting propagated out to the Internet).

By definition, IP addresses in certain ranges are reserved for private use. Specifically, those are:

10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255

172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255

192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255

Addresses beyond these are used for public addressing. The way that you can think about this is kind of like the post office and the internal mail delivery of a business. The address that the Post Office and the general public know may be 123 Main Street but that only gets to the building. To reach the appropriate person, the mail must be delivered to the right office. So, the business mail room clerk takes everything from the Post Office mailman and performs a lookup to route the mail to its final destination based on the internal address as defined by the office number. The same is true for how the Internet works. Any router that provides access to the Internet is given a public IP address and it acts as the mail room clerk. Everything destined for all machines behind it must come to its address and then it will send the appropriate information to the intended recipient. This way, the public knows only the address of the router but has no idea (or any need to know) the internal structure of the network.

Does this help with your understanding and purpose of private IP addressing? If you have any other questions, feel free to let me know.

Answer 4

Any address that starts with 192.168 is a private address.