Confused about IP address

U

Unquestionably

New Member
Say my IP address is: 123.456.789.123, and my internet provider is Company-X.

My neighbor's internet provider is also Company-X.

Does he and I share the same IP address?

Which part of the IP address is specific to Company-X, and which part is specific to clients of Company-X?
 
Nope. Typically, an ISP has a block of IP addresses. When you connect to them, you get an address out of that pool. It is unique. If you disconnect and reconnect, you may get the same address or it may be different.

The IP addresses that an ISP have may vary quite considerably. Anyone looking up your allocated IP address with a whois query will get the ISP company listing because their blocks of addresses are unique to them.

You can get a unique, permanent address from your ISP but you usually have to pay extra for that.
 
But you still haven't answerd my question:

Which part of 123.456.789.123 belongs to the company?

If I assume 123.456 belongs to the company, and 789.123 are their clients, does it mean that company is limited to (255 x 255 = 65025) clients only?

How about those ISP that provide services to millions of clients?

(P.S.: The reason I'm asking is b/c I want to record a user's IP address in my database, and I don't want that user to be mistaken for some other user of the same ISP.)
 
Last edited:
You cannot attach an IP address to one user. Another person from the same ISP could get exactly the same address on another occasion. I assume that if someone wanted to track one person they would have to contact the ISP to find which user had that address at a particular time.

The reason ISP use pools of addresses is that not all users will be online at once so they can get by with less and pay less. It's also why a unique address costs extra money because instead of sharing you have sole use.

The shortage of addresses is one reason why IP6 is replacing IP4. IP4 has a max of 4.3 billion addresses.

You would probably need to use cookies to track users, not popular with everyone.
 
You cannot do that.
It is only possible if everyone owns a static ip which is impossible except in case if the ISP only assigns Static IPs(There are some in India).
Every ipv4 address is 32 bits,which would make 4,294,967,296 4 billion users at a particular instant.That is why Dynamic IP is used so that when one user is not connected to internet and not using a specific ip so when free the ip can be assigned to some-one else.And that is the reason static ips require extra payment.
But the total internet users in the world are close to 2billion and the total number of internet connections are higher than that because many users have multiple connections like in companies and stuff.

And I don't think the ip is divided that way because if that is the case then there would be 65,536 ISPs and only that many users.
 
Unquestionably said:
But you still haven't answerd my question:

Which part of 123.456.789.123 belongs to the company?

If I assume 123.456 belongs to the company, and 789.123 are their clients, does it mean that company is limited to (255 x 255 = 65025) clients only?

How about those ISP that provide services to millions of clients?

(P.S.: The reason I'm asking is b/c I want to record a user's IP address in my database, and I don't want that user to be mistaken for some other user of the same ISP.)
Click to expand...
Asking these sort of questions without an understanding of the ISP Tier system is pointless. Sounds like you need to take the first class of the CCNA program "Cisco 1" if you want to know about this stuff.
As far as tracking people only ISP's can do that, but im sure they don't have time to go over their logs and see who had what IP and when.
 
Last edited:
teamhex said:
Asking these sort of questions without an understanding of the ISP Tier system is pointless. Sounds like you need to take the first class of the CCNA program "Cisco 1" if you want to know about this stuff......
Click to expand...
That's rather rude. If everyone knew everything, they would not be coming here for advice would they?
 
I thought that all host stats showed was the IP address. It does not matter how you cook it, any users of the same ISP could have that address. What subnet are you referring to?
 
Most home network IP adress start with 192.168.x.y

x= typically refers to the router
y= refers to the device (PC, smartphone)

I might be mistaken CCNA 1 is behind me.

no one part of the Ip adress that I know of refers to the ISP for the subnet mask it's typically 255.255.255 as a broadcast.
 
FXB said:
Most home network IP adress start with 192.168.x.y

x= typically refers to the router
y= refers to the device (PC, smartphone)

I might be mistaken CCNA 1 is behind me.

no one part of the Ip adress that I know of refers to the ISP for the subnet mask it's typically 255.255.255 as a broadcast.
Click to expand...

What? The OP is asking about external IP addresses not internal.. No offense, but you should go back to CCNA 1 if you got that mixed up. Same with the Subnet Mask. However, if we were talking about internal addressing everything you said would be correct. Other than when you said "router" you should've said "Gateway."

Nanobyte covered all the bases, theres no way to track a host through IP addresses unless you are with law enforcement or own an ISP. Btw, this is going to get even worse pretty soon. I hear IPv6 is on its way very soon. I know many ISPs and cell phone companies are already using it.
 
Oh, nevermind. I wanted to do a referral program where if the referee has a unique IP address, then the referrer gets 1 referral point.

Looks like I might have to allow for some redundancies...

How many same IP addresses should I allow before the referrer gets no referral point?
 
Bacon said:
What? The OP is asking about external IP addresses not internal.. No offense, but you should go back to CCNA 1 if you got that mixed up. Same with the Subnet Mask. However, if we were talking about internal addressing everything you said would be correct. Other than when you said "router" you should've said "Gateway."

Nanobyte covered all the bases, theres no way to track a host through IP addresses unless you are with law enforcement or own an ISP. Btw, this is going to get even worse pretty soon. I hear IPv6 is on its way very soon. I know many ISPs and cell phone companies are already using it.
Click to expand...

Anyone familiar with PHP?

Does $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'] return the IPv4 value only, or both IPv4 and IPv6?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top