Your IP address is something you might not normally think about—you may never have even heard of it—but it’s an important piece of information tied to every device on your home network. Knowing the ins and outs of IP addresses can be useful when setting up your home Wi-Fi, troubleshooting connection issues, and keeping your devices secure while they’re online. Here’s how to find them and what they do.
How to Find Your Local and Remote IP Address
An IP address is an Internet Protocol address: it works a bit like a postal address for where you live, allowing websites and web servers to find you and maintain a working connection. It’s an essential piece of code that makes the Internet work, and it looks like a string of numbers and letters with a bit of punctuation thrown in.
Every device connected to your router in your home has a local (or private) IP address, which helps the router figure out which device is which and keep everything running smoothly. Additionally, your router has an external (or public) IP address that it broadcasts to the world, which ensures that everything on the internet can find you.
You will see both the older, simpler IPv4 addresses and the newer, more complex IPv6 addresses for your devices. Most current hardware uses both, but IPv4 is expected to be phased out eventually, albeit very slowly. IPv6 was introduced back in 1995 because the Internet simply ran out of addresses to use.
