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What Is Private IP Addressing???

A private network is a network that uses private IP addressing. These address are commonly used for home, office and enterprise local area network (LAN).

Continuing with our occasional write-ups on networking concepts, this time around, we will be talking about Private Addressing, a technique which was proposed as a viable solution for the growing problem of IP addresses exhaustion.

What is Private Addressing ?

Private Addressing : An addressing technique used for the purpose of of assigning IP addresses to network nodes within an office intranet or organization specific network for internal communication & data/resource sharing. It does not require assignment of unique Public IP addresses as the majority of communication remains internal/private and the network nodes are not supposed to communicate on internet for general purposes. Private addressing serves as a solution to the problem of Exhaustion of limited IP address resource.

Private addressing was proposed as a possible solution to one of the most threatening problems of IPv4 addressing and it has, by far been successful in managing to save limited IP address resource from getting exhausted.

How Private Addressing is done ?

Internet Standards Group specified three IP address ranges as Private Addressing ranges, which would never be used for public IP addressing to avoid any possible IP conflicts and would be kept reserved for private usage only. The three reserved IP address ranges are :

  1. 10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255
  2. 172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255
  3. 192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255

Now, within an organization or closed group, if IP addresses are allocated from any of the three reserved address ranges then the addressing will be considered private.

Other Benefits of Private Addressing

  • Effectively utilizing limited IP address resource
  • Security from unintended external access
  • Control over internal network usage

As network nodes using private address do need a public IP address to communicate over internet, various address translation techniques such as NAT and firewall/proxy methods have been devised to facilitate private network nodes with a public IP address on a temporary basis.

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