Every packet crossing the Internet carries two addresses—where it came from and where it's going. Without these coordinates, data is lost. With them, information finds its way home across billions of devices.
IPv4 ran out of addresses decades ago—yet your home has a dozen connected devices. Public and private addresses, working through NAT, explain how the Internet survived its own success.
The Internet ran out of addresses in 2011. It kept working anyway. Here's how—and why the real fix is still only halfway deployed.
Static IPs are for devices that need to be found. Dynamic IPs are for devices that do the finding. The difference isn't technical—it's about whether you're being called or calling.
Your public IP address is the return address on every packet you send. Here's how to find it—and why it keeps changing.
Your device has two identities—one for the world, one for home. Here's how to find the private IP address your router uses to tell your devices apart.
IPv6 was designed in 1995. It's 2025 and we're halfway there. This isn't technical failure—it's the economics of infrastructure transitions.
IPv4 gave us 4.3 billion addresses. We used them all. Here's why that didn't break the Internet—and what's actually keeping it running.
Not every IP address belongs to the public Internet. Some ranges exist for private networks, self-communication, failure states, and group messaging—exceptions that make the whole system work.
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