I could be totally wrong here, but I’ve always been under the impression that IP addresses are unique in that for every address, there is one and only one server/computer, and viceversa. How do you accomplish this given all the different manufacturers, countries’ internet protocols, etc.?
In: Technology
They Don’t!
Each computer or device connected to the internet does not have a unique IP address.
There are today 10+ Billion devices connected to the Internet, however the IPv4 address space is only 4.2 Billion address (because it’s a 32 bit number, so 2^32 addresses).
So how it works ??? mechanisms like NAT44(NAT) – Normal NAT(Network Address Translation) and NAT444/CGN(Carrier grade NAT) which is huge! on a large scale…allow multiple devices to use the same IP address to communicate in the Internet. I won’t go into the gruesome technical details here, but they have helped us save tremendous amount of IPv4 address space.
In fact every mobile phone Internet works through CGN, you’ll see your mobile’s IP as 100.x.x.x because that’s a special IP address range reserved for CGN servers.
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