Do my computer and phone have the same IP address if they’re connected to the same wifi? If so, how do the websites distinguish my computer from my phone?
In: 5
An IP address is a numeric address to identify a device on a network.
On your home network your computer and phone are assigned a local IP each when they connect to your router.
Your router will be assigned an IP when it connects to the internet.
When you visit a website using your computer connected through your router the website will see the router IP. Data is sent to that address then your router forwards it on to the appropriate device.
Imagine it like internal mail in an office. You can post something to the office (router) and the office then figures out which desk to get it to.
Complicated question, I’ll do my best
An IP Address is an internet address, and they function in the same way that a house address does.
Packets of information heading to and from the internet are stamped with source and destination addresses, and information travels over the internet like a series of highways with intersections called routers.
IPs are 4-octets or 4x 8-bit numbers (0-255)
for example 151.101.65.140 (reddit.com)
IP addresses are unique to ensure information gets to and from where it’s going.
Where it gets complicated is with NAT. Businesses and Houses use Private IPs, IP addresses that are illegal on the internet. Addresses that often look like 192.168.0.100. These addresses are reserved to be used inside of businesses so that a business only needs 1 or a handful of Unique or Public IPs to connect to the internet.
We do this because if we didn’t, we would have run out of unique IP addresses a long time ago. This clever trick has the benefit that a lot of different houses and businesses can re-use the same 192.168.x.x IPs over and over again without a problem.
When traffic leaves a house or a business the NAT router (often your modem or router) removes the private IP on the package and replaces it with the public IP assigned by your ISP. When the packet returns the router then swaps the address back to your private one.
It keeps track of this on a table in its memory like a doorman to an apartment building tracking which apartment sent and is expecting a package from where.
So when your computer, smart TV, and phone are connected to the wifi the internet sees them all as having the same IP address while it’s actually your router acting like the doorman.
an IP address is an address given to your access point to the internet. If all your devices are hooked to the internet through that router (connected to the internet), they all share the same IP address (outside your home). That is called a routable address. You actually have another small network of addresses on your home’s side of the router. Those are also IP addresses, but they’re referred to as non routable addresses.
It’s the home of that dude who’s REALLY good at Kung Fu.
Legend goes he even taught Bruce Lee how to fight, so it’s a very important address historically speaking.
An IP address is a unique identifier for a device on a network. Every device on a network must have a unique IP address. The Internet is considered a giant network, so every device directly connected to the Internet has a unique IP address.
>Do my computer and phone have the same IP address if they’re connected to the same wifi?
Yes and no.
Your modem has a single IP address as seen by the rest of the world. So if you visit a site from any device on your network, that site will see the same IP address.
However, to distinguish devices within a network, each device must have its own address as well. These addresses are usually assigned by the modem, and these addresses only need to be unique *within* the network.
For example, to the outside world, your modem may have the IP address 123.45.67.89, but within your network, your devices may have IP addresses like 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, etc. The modem/router determines how to direct the data based on information like the port number.
>If so, how do the websites distinguish my computer from my phone?
The website doesn’t need to. It just responds to requests. Your modem/router is responsible for determining where to route data.
An IP Address is the house number in the suburb that is your home network, each piece of technology on your network (phone, PC, laptop, Alexa, etc…) is a house with it’s own address.
On the internet, your network has an IP address too which all your devices share, basically the postcode of your suburb, if anyone wants to send anything to you or you want to go out to somewhere else on the internet, they use that postcode to get to your network and your router uses the house numbers of your network to deliver the information.
> Do my computer and phone have the same IP address if they’re connected to the same wifi?
Not necessarily but they do have the same public IPv4 address most of the time these days due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses. Within the wi-fi network they don’t have the same address.
> If so, how do the websites distinguish my computer from my phone?
The same way they distinguish two browsers on your computer accessing the same website. Each outgoing request is sent with a unique source port number. When the website responds it copies incoming source port number to the outgoing destination port number. When the response packet reaches wi-fi router or computer they can deliver the packet to the right device and application by looking at the destination port number.
The other commenters do a good job explaining NAT and how IP addresses work, but one thing worth noting is that an IP address does NOT identify a computer/device. Rather, it identifies a network interface. A computer can have multiple network interfaces. What this means for you is that if you are connected to both WiFi and Ethernet at the same time on your laptop, you can actually have two IP addresses at the same time. Your laptop would have one network interface for Ethernet and one network interface for WiFi. If you are hosting a server on your laptop and connecting to your laptop from your phone, for example, and then you unplug the Ethernet cable from your laptop and move somewhere else, then your laptop’s IP address would change (from your phone’s perspective) if your phone was using the laptop’s Ethernet IP address. And that would cause a connectivity hiccup, even though your laptop and your phone were both connected to WiFi the whole time.
Imagine two apartment buildings, A and B. A’s address is 123 Main Street. B’s address is 223 Main Street. Those addresses are like your IP addresses. Your home network is like an apartment building, it has one IP address.
Each of those buildings has individual apartments with their own numbers. Lets say there are 5 apartments in each, and they are number 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. those are like your devices addresses on your local WiFi network. If you want to go to an apartment in your same building you can ignore the buildings address, you are already there. Same with devices on your home network, they can talk to each other without using the Internet. But if you want to talk to another building you have to know their IP address.
Here is where things change. If I live in building A and you living in building B and we want to send letters to each other, we have to know the full address. But in the internet thats not the case. When I send a message to you using the internet I don’t need to know your full address. I just give your name and IP. When it gets to your building the building looks up your room number and delivers it to you. Even if you change apartments, as long as you are in the same building, I can send letters to you without doing anything different. Your building routes the traffic to the correct apartment, and if you send a letter to me my building does the same.
Latest Answers