IP

1. Short for Internet Protocol address, an IP address is an address of a computer or other network device on a network using TCP/IP. For example, the number "166.70.10.23" is an example of such an address. These addresses are similar to an addresses used on a house and is what allows data to reach the appropriate destination on a network and the Internet.

There are five classes of available IP ranges: Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D and Class E, while only A, B, and C are commonly used. Each class allows for a range of valid IP addresses. Below is a listing of these addresses.

Class	Address Range	Supports
Class A	1.0.0.1 to 126.255.255.254	Supports 16 million hosts on each of 127 networks.
Class B	128.1.0.1 to 191.255.255.254	Supports 65,000 hosts on each of 16,000 networks.
Class C	192.0.1.1 to 223.255.254.254	Supports 254 hosts on each of 2 million networks.
Class D	224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255	Reserved for multicast  groups.
Class E	240.0.0.0 to 254.255.255.254	Reserved for future use, or Research and Development Purposes.

Ranges 127.x.x.x are reserved for the loopback or localhost  for example, 127.0.0.1 is the common loopback address. Range 255.255.255.255 broadcasts to all hosts on the local network.

IP address breakdown

Every IP address is broke down into four sets of octes that break down into Binary to represent the actual IP address. The below table is an example of the IP 255.255.255.255. If you are new to binary, we highly recommend reading our binary and hexadecimal conversions section to get a better understanding of what we're doing in the below charts.

IP:	255	255	255	255
Binary value:	11111111	11111111	11111111	11111111
Octet value:	8	8	8	8

If we were to break down the IP "166.70.10.23", you would get the below value. In the below table, the first row is the IP address, the second row is the binary values, and the third row shows how the binary value equals the section of the IP address.

166	70	10	23
10100110	01000110	00001010	00010111
128+32+4+2=166	64+4+2=70	8+2=10	16+4+2+1=23