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A public IP address is an IP address that your home or business router receives from your ISP. Public IP addresses are required for any publicly accessible network hardware, like for your home router as well as for the servers that host websites.
It’s this address that each Internet Service Provider uses to forward internet requests to a specific home or business, much like how a delivery vehicle uses your physical address to forward packages to your house.
The same exclusivity is applied to your IP address so your digital requests are sent to your network…and not someone else’s.
Private vs Public IP Addresses
A private IP address is, in most ways, the same thing as a public IP address. It’s a unique identifier for all the devices behind a router or other device that serves out IP addresses.
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Another way to look at this is to think of the router in your home as your own Internet Service Provider. While your router serves out private IP addresses to the devices privately connected behind your router, your ISP delivers public IP addresses to the devices that are publicly connected to the internet.
When you try opening a website from your computer, the request is sent from your computer to your router as a private IP address, after which your router requests the website from your ISP using the public IP address assigned to your network. Once the request has been made, the operations are reversed — the ISP sends the address of the website to your router, which forwards the address to the computer that asked for it.
Range of Public IP Addresses
Certain IP addresses are reserved for public use and others for private use. This is what makes private IP addresses unable to reach the public internet, because they aren’t even able to communicate properly unless they exist behind a router.
- 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
- 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
- 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255
All of the “192…” addresses are not registered publicly, which means they can only be used behind a router as private IP addresses. This range is where most private IP addresses fall, which is why the default IP address for most Linksys, D-Link, Cisco, and NETGEAR routers is an IP within this set.
How to Find Your Public IP Address
You don’t need to know your public IP address most of the time, but there are situations where having it is important or even necessary, like when you need to access your network, or a computer within it, from away from home or your business.
It’s surprisingly easy to find your public IP address. So easy, in fact, that you can use our own Lifewire System Info Tool to see yours right now:
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Why Public IP Addresses Change
Most public IP addresses change, and relatively often. Any type of IP address that changes is called a dynamic IP address.
This way of assigning IP addresses meant that the ISP wouldn’t need to purchase such a large number of them. This general process is still in use today even though most of us are always connected to the internet.
Home networks, on the other hand, almost always are assigned dynamic IP addresses for the opposite reason. If an ISP gave your network an unchanging address, it may be more likely to be abused by customers who are hosting websites from home, or by hackers who can try the same IP address over and over until they breach your network.
Another reason most networks have public IP addresses that change is because static IP addresses require more management, and therefore normally cost more for a customer to have than a dynamic one.
Hiding Your Public IP Address
You can’t hide your public IP address from your ISP because all of your traffic has to move through them before reaching anything else on the internet. However, you can hide your IP address from the websites you visit, as well as encrypt all of the data transfers (thus hiding traffic from your ISP), by first filtering all your data through a virtual private network (VPN).
Say, for example, that you wanted your IP address to be hidden from Google.com. Normally, when accessing Google’s website, they would be able to see that your specific public IP address has requested to view their website. Doing a quick search on one of the IP finding websites from above would tell them who your ISP is. Since your ISP knows which IP addresses have been assigned to you, specifically, would mean that your visit to Google could be pinned directly to you.
Using a VPN service adds another ISP at the end of your request before you open Google’s website.
Once connected to a VPN, the same process as above takes place, only this time, instead of Google seeing the IP address that your ISP has assigned to you, they see the IP address that the VPN has assigned.
Here’s an example of Google displaying a public IP address before and after a VPN is used:
So, if Google wanted to identify you, they’d have to request that information from the VPN service instead of your ISP, because again, that’s the IP address they saw access their website.
At this point, your anonymity hinges on whether the VPN service is willing to give up your IP address, which of course reveals your identity. The difference between most ISP’s and most VPN services is that an ISP is more likely to be required by law to give up who it is that accessed the website, while VPN’s sometimes exist in countries that have no such obligation.
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There are lots of free and paid VPN services out there that all offer different features. Looking for one that never saves traffic logs may be a good start if you’re concerned that your ISP is spying on you.
A few free VPN services include FreeVPN.me, Hideman, Faceless.ME, and Windscribe.
More Information on Public IP Addresses
Routers are assigned one private address called the default gateway IP address. In a similar fashion to your network having one IP address that communicates with the public internet, your router has one IP address that communicates with other private networks.
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