What is an IP address?

Every computer that's connected to the Internet has its own unique "address." Tune in as Marshall explains how IP addresses work -- and how many of them exist -- in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
from how Stuff works dot com, where smart happens him
mercial brain With today's question, what is an IP address?
Every machine on the Internet has a unique identifying number
called an IP address. A typical IP address looks something

(00:46):
like this to sixteen dot seven dot sixty one dot
one thirty seven. It's made up of four numbers with
dots between them to make it easier for US humans
to remember. IP addresses their normally expressed in decimal format
as a dotted decimal number like this, but computers communicate

(01:06):
in binary form to a computer, and IP address is
just a thirty two bit binary number. To sixteen twenty
seven dot sixty one dot one thirty seven is a
representation of that thirty two bit binary form. The four
decimal numbers in an IP address are called octets because
they each have eight positions. When viewed in binary form,

(01:30):
if you add all the positions together, you get thirty two,
which is why I P addresses are considered to be
thirty two bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions
can have two different states, one or zero, the total
number of possible combinations per octet is two hundred fifty six,
so each octet can contain any value between zero and

(01:50):
two hundred fifty five. Combine the four octets and you
get about four billion unique values. Out of those four
billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as
typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address zero dot
zero dot zero dot zero is reserved for the default network,
and the address to fifty five dot to dot to

(02:12):
dot to fifty five is used for broadcasts. The octets
serve a purpose other than simply separating the numbers. They're
also used to create classes of IP addresses that can
be assigned to a particular business, government, or other entity
based on size and need. The octets are split into
two sections, Net and host. The net section always contains

(02:35):
the first doctet. It's used to identify the network that
a computer belongs to. Host, sometimes referred to as node,
identifies the actual computer on the network. The host section
always contains the last doctet. When originally conceived, there was
no idea that the Internet would become so popular, But
today almost all of the four billion addresses are in use.

(02:58):
So there's a new standard called i p V six,
where IP addresses become a hundred and twenty eight bits long.
This number of bits should allow enough IP addresses so
that we never ever run out of them again. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out

(03:18):
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