Types of Internet Address | Home Network

As discussed before in the previous post on Internet Address On Home Network, there are actually different kinds of IP addresses on the Internet.

When the Internet was in still in its infancy, sites were assigned addresses from one of these address classes namely Class A, Class B and Class C. What makes them different from each other is the number of IP addresses each class can hold. However, the bigger Class A networks are only a handful while the smaller Class C networks are plentiful. So for historical purposes, here are some information on each various kinds of network.

Class A - There can be 16.7 million host existing on this Class of network.
Class B - There can be 65K host existing on this Class of network
Class C - There can only be 254 host existing on this Class of network.

So enough for this history lesson, how does this relate to our home networking ? Well, the addressing scheme still persists in a loose sense today and while we don't really follow them anymore, they can be a reference point when we are setting up our home network.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority which is a body set up to monitor and issue specifications on the type of IP address that can be used, has reserved the following 3 blocks of IP address for private networks which incidentally refers to our very own home network.

These are :-

• 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (Biggest number of host)
• 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (Medium number of host)
• 192.168.0.0-192.168.255.255 (Smallest number of host)

These range of Internet Address are used only in home networks and not on the Internet. If you are in the office or in a home network, you will notice that your IP address belongs to one of the range of IPs shown above. Most of the home network setup uses the last IP range of 192.168.0.x.

I usually use 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 and so on for the number of PCs that I have on my local home computer network. Then I label each machine with their respective numbers so I can easily share files and communicate among them.

You must be thinking oh gosh, this is so much work to issue one by one. Not to worry, in the next instalment of this blog, I will be talking about a feature commonly found in home network router which automatically gives you an IP address for each of the computers in your own home network. This feature is called the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol or DHCP. Interested to know more ? Stay tuned !