An IP Address is like your street address in the digital world. It marks where a device resides within a network, and helps to direct internet traffic where it needs to go, such as directing emails to your inbox or web browser to a favorite website.

Every computer and other devices connected to the internet have an IP 192.168.o.1 address. They use it to identify themselves, and they need it to communicate with other computers and devices on the internet and in local networks. Without it, the devices couldn’t do anything because the information they need to send and receive wouldn’t reach them.

Your router has a local IP address that helps it identify devices on your home network. It also has a public IP address that acts as your face to the wider internet.

You might have heard of an IP address, but don’t fully understand what it does or how it works. That’s okay, most people don’t know either. The concept is fairly complex, but we’ll break it down for you in easy-to-understand terms without drowning you in technical jargon.

When you connect to the internet, your router assigns you a private, internal IP address. Your router does this because it knows that you only want to communicate with other devices on your network and not the entire internet. However, when your computer connects to the wider internet, it needs to tell the rest of the world where it is. The best way to do that is with an IP address.

In the past, all IP addresses were purely numerical. Now, we have IPv6 addresses that use 128 bits and include both numbers and letters (for example, 2002:db8:8a3f:362:7897). In most cases, you won’t need to worry about the difference between these types of IP addresses, but it is worth understanding the differences between them.

The main thing that distinguishes between these two is how they’re used. IPv4 uses 32-bits to identify devices and their locations in a network, while IPv6 has 2128-bits that can be used to do the same thing, giving it much more space than its predecessor.

Most networks that handle internet traffic are packet-switched, which means that large amounts of data are broken down into small units of information, called packets. Each packet contains an IP address, which tells the gateway computer on the network where to deliver the packet to next. The gateways do this based on the addresses in their packet headers, which are compared with the IP address of the destination host.

This process allows for a huge amount of internet traffic to move through networks and to websites. It also has downsides, though. For example, your IP address can reveal your real-world location to cybercriminals, who could use it to steal your personal information or carry out attacks against a website, such as a distributed denial of service attack. This type of attack involves sending massive amounts of fake internet traffic to a site in the hope that it will overwhelm it and crash it. Criminals can often get an IP address by contacting your Internet service provider and asking them to reveal your information.