How do services and applications differentiate between two PCs in the same network if they have the same public IP?
In: Technology
That’s where the network address translation (NAT) table comes in. The packets coming into your network have additional data attached to them that lets your networking equipment forward them to their correct destination. If your phone’s hostname on your local network is, say, “myphone” or whatever, the packet is marked to be delivered to “myphone” at your IP address.
Things get more complicated than that as you nest networks inside networks inside networks (you probably share your public IP with a whole bunch of other users, meaning your whole network is an entry on a larger NAT table somewhere in some “public” piece of networking equipment that serves your whole neighborhood), but that’s the gist of it.
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