In countries outside the US and Europe the accuracy for the city level 25mile/40km radius is around 55%.

More facts and details about looking up IP addresses

Pretty much all that anyone cares about when we go on the Internet is that our connection works. We leave all the connectivity issues to people who know what they’re doing. Still, a little knowledge can go a long way. You don’t have to be a computer science major to grasp some of the issues involved with how you connect to the internet.

In fact, there may be times when you need to know something technical...like finding your IP address.

“What Is My IP Address?”

As you’re reading this, you’re on the website WhatIsMyIPAddress.com, and you probably first came here to check your IP address.

You wanted to know the following:

1. Your IP address at home, because perhaps IT person needed to know it to do some troubleshooting or to help you connect to the internet.
2. You wanted to see your IP address because you’re using what’s called a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which masks your “actual” IP address with another. You wanted to make sure your VPN is working as it should.

The good news, when you land on the WhatIsMyIPAddress.com home page, you instantly and automatically see your connected IP address.

The story behind WhatIsMyIPAddress.com

It wasn’t always so easy to find your own IP address, according to Chris Parker, CEO and founder of WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

“Way back in the mid-nineties, there wasn’t an easy way for people to look up or find out their own IP address,” Parker says. “It was a frustrating problem, because if someone needed to find it out to solve a connectivity issue, you’d need help doing it. So, once I found out the process, I created a small program that would help out the IT community. I eventually made my solution available to everyone. And then I put it on a website.”

Chris put his solution on a website, calling it “ WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.” He didn’t pay much attention to it for a while, but soon realized that thousands of people were visiting his website. He was running his website on the side while he continued to work full-time in an IT capacity. Not, long after that, he moved on from his full-time job and decided to focus on his full-time.

IP Lookup Tools and more

Chris Parker was surprised to discover that thousands of people were coming to his website weekly. Soon, he would develop additional tools and content to give people more help and information they might want and couldn’t find easily elsewhere.

As an example, he realized that many people might want to verify a location of someone whom they were connecting with. Much of that had to do with catching people in a lie and fraud prevention.

For instance, If a person says they’re a soldier stationed in California, but when you looked up their IP address, you discovered their connection places them in India, that would be something to be concerned about.

The IP Lookup tool (the page you’re on right now) does just that. It’s a simple way to get some information on a computer-user without invading their privacy.

The IP Lookup page and tool provides the same information about an IP address that you can find about your own IP address. It’s what you see at the top of this page, and the Show Complete IP Details page as well, when you click on the link.

The information you find from the IP Lookup page

On the IP Lookup page, you’ll get a quick overview of the following:

The IP address detected and information about your IP address:

• ISP: Internet Service Provider
• City the IP address is in
• Region and country

On that same page, you’ll see a link: Show Complete IP Details, which when you click on it will show:

• Decimal
• Host name
• ASN: a specific number
• ISP
• Services: Any known services running on that IP
• Assignment: refers to type of IP address
• Country
• State or region
• City
• Latitude and longitude of the location (a proximity)
• Area code for that region

Finally, you’ll see a map that “pinpoints” (a “best proximity” of) your location on a map. This helps ensure that the internet has an idea of where you’re connecting from. Think of how valuable that is when you’re looking for relevant services.

And again, this information is public. Anyone on the internet, from companies you do business with to friends and family you email with, can see your IP Address and lookup up details on it.

If you know someone’s IP, up can put it in the IP Lookup tool

There are a variety of ways others can get your IP address and all of them are legal because your IP address is public and visible and is included (although hidden) in your communications online.

In other words, your IP address is included in the “request transactions” when you send someone an email or visit a website. It’s how you communicate and how you tell the website how to send information back to you.

By the way, it’s also the IP address that the internet sees—that is, if someone you’re connected with (the DMV, Amazon.com, a department store) wanted to know your IP address, they have easy ways to find out.

An IP address is public. The whole world can see it if they want

Now, for the most part, having your IP address “exposed” to the world doesn’t present any dangers or worries. If someone were to hack your home network, that problem wouldn’t extend beyond your IP address.

Still, as you can see from the IP Lookup page, someone can get a “digital profile” of sorts if they know your IP address. After all, it’s public information, as is your home or business address.

And while your IP address doesn’t reveal your name, home address and other details, it does tell someone (or some entity, such as a government agency) what city or region you’re in.

If they use the IP Lookup tool they can find that out...but so can anyone, and that’s not necessarily a bad or evil thing, but it can be annoying.

Businesses like knowing where their online business (or inquiries) are coming from

Companies can get a profile of where their online customers or prospects are coming from, based on the number of “business or business inquiries coming” from IP addresses from a certain region.

That type of easy-to-gain and legal data could be valuable to them for marketing or product development purposes. They don’t need to know names and addresses—just knowing that online shoppers from a certain region, county or Zip Code have been showing interest in a product or service.

All that free and public information comes courtesy of IP addresses.

If you’re connected, you have an IP Address

Your IP address is at the heart of being online. Here’s another way to look at it: If you don’t have an IP address, you’re not connected to a network that’s connected to the Internet. Also, other computers connected to the internet can’t send you information you want.

Simple, right? Yes...and no. It’s rather brilliant that an IP address connects you to the world via a worldwide network, in much the same way your home’s, apartment’s, or business’s physical address connects you to a mail/postal and/or package delivery system.

So, while it seems simple, the technology, thinking and design behind it all is impressive, elegant and best of all, it works all the time.

Here’s an explanation and some background on the IP address, in non-technical terms.

“IP” (the IP address) is part of the TCP/IP Protocol.

Don’t let that scare you off too quickly. As we said, we cover technical terms because their relevance, but few of us need to know the intricate details of how networking works. For example, your IT person at work or someone helping you set up a special connection knows how to find your IP address and use it to provide it to networks.

The good news is that the behind-the-scenes details about IP protocols and networks operate seamless and automatically, thanks to the bright people who created it.

The IP in TCP/IP stands for Internet Protocol. The TCP part stands for Transmission Control Protocol. A protocol, if you look up the word up, means rules or agreed upon processes. The string of numbers and dots you see with your IP address are at the heart of those protocols and what they mean and do. (For more details, read our article on the topic.)

For networking purposes, your computer is called a host. When you’re connected to the internet, your host has a number assigned to it...the IP address. It’s aways “IP address,” not the “Internet Protocol address. Sometimes it’s simply called your IP.

There are other numbers that identify your computer, such as a MAC address, but the IP address is where the connectivity happens.

By the way, your computer has a name, too. You probably don’t even know what it is by now, but at one point in time either you or somebody you know gave it a name. It could be “Mikes PC” or “Dads Laptop,” for instance. It simply identifies the device, but that’s good enough. That name is registered somewhere in your network, so it knows the IP address assigned to that device.

But it’s your computer’s IP address that is the ticket to getting on the internet; it’s what identifies a computer as ready and able to connect to the internet.

Who is managing the protocols?

TCP/IP isn’t the only protocol involved with connecting to the internet, because there is an entire set involved. TCP/IP is called the TCP/IP stack or sometimes the protocol suite.

No one group or company or government is controlling the internet, which is a good thing. Also, not one organization owns the protocols. Rather there are a handful of organizations that review, shape and guide the protocols and internet policies.

Here are some of them:

ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It’s a non-profit group run by a board of directors from various countries.

IAB. Internet Activities Board. This group is responsible for overseeing the protocols and includes other committees focusing on internet issues.

IETF. The Internet Engineering Task Force. This is a group of dozens of committees (more than 70) whose focus is on keeping the internet going without stop.

ISOC. The Internet Society. They are focused on where the internet is headed. ISOC members come from corporations, government organizations and select people. Many of the other groups above are also part of ISOC.

The ISOC and the ICANN are the primary groups managing the internet.

If you want to read a non-technical book about the history of networking and how the internet came about—the key people, organizations and events that took place—read Walter Isaacson’s best-selling book, “The Innovators.” It’s a non-technical account of how all of the connectivity we have today came about.

What is an RFC?

Because technology is constantly changing and the internet continues to grow, protocols are continually being refined, changing and created. That happens through a process called Request for Comments, or RFC, which is run by a group that is a major part of the Internet Society.

RFCs breakdown into various categories, for organization, depending on the RFC’s “stage of development.” Three categories, which are identified as the standards track for the following:

• Standard (STD)
• Draft standard
• Proposed standard

Other categories simply help manage all content related to RFCs, such as BCP (best current practices), Historic (a catalog of all past and obsolete RFCs) and EXP (Experimental), indicating a research or development project.

The RFC process, which is key to TCP/IP development, is actually a very democratic and transparent process. Quite likely, new ideas for improving TCP/IP come from groups and individuals that are part of one of the key internet groups and committees. Most of these organizations are open to receiving ideas and inquiries and you can find out how to contact them online.

Moving between software and hardware

If TCP/IP is a protocol for communicating on networks, there has to be hardware involved that speaks the same language. After all, software resides on hardware and networking devices.

Where TCP/IP is concerned, it’s important to know about network technology that’s everywhere there is a connection—Ethernet. More specifically, Ethernet is the technology that is behind Local Area Networks, or LAN. Ethernet is what makes it possible to send data here and there for every type of device. TCP/IP controls the functions that sends data to hardware and even connects different computer hardware.

The key component for communication is a network interface card (NIC). It’s also called a network adapter or network card. These pieces of the networking puzzle are being changed and streamlined all the time. NIC is what allows your computer to connect to a network, whether by a cable or wirelessly.

More importantly, every NIC is hardcoded on it and has a unique hardware address that’s called the Media Access Control, or MAC. A handful of protocols communicate with MAC.

A Local Area Network connected by Ethernet, from a desktop and laptop to a printer, all have both NIC and TCP/IP software running on it.

The arrival of IPv6

For the most part, a majority of the IP addresses in use today are IPv4, which stands for “Version 4.” The IP address numbers we get assigned, derived from the TCP/IP protocols, is a unique code for the Internet, the biggest network we use to connect to the world.

Until around 2015, your IP address wasn’t referred to as an IPv4 type: It was just your IP address. But then, the people who were part of monitoring and improving the internet realized that, to their surprise, there weren’t going to be enough new and available IP addresses “indefinitely.” That’s when a new version began gaining exposure and usage.

It was labeled IPv6. (Note: There is no word on what happened to IPv5, for some reason.)

So now, when you go to the WhatIsMyIPAddress.com home page (MyIP), you’ll see your current IP address in current IPv4 format, and you’ll also see an IPv6 address if one is found to be active. If not it will read “not detected.” In fact, “WhatIsMyIPAddress.com was the first IP address lookup website to make both IPv4 and IPv6 visible.

You needn’t worry about your IP address or what version you’re using. Either will work and you’ll never notice the difference. IPv6 doesn’t provide any type of connectivity advantage.

Still, you might be wondering how the experts in all this were almost caught short. Here’s how this all came about.

Not enough to go around

In the media, there was a sense of urgency that the world was going to run out of IP addresses. No one would have anticipated that nearly 40 years ago. The way IP addresses were mathematically derived seem to ensure that it would not happen. In the 1980s, people thought that 4.3 billion IP addresses would be enough.

IP addresses likely seemed like sand on the beach. There would always be plenty. Not so. The people who monitor the internet saw a problem looming. They recognized that at the rate the internet was exploding, there would soon be no regular IPv4 addresses available to the organizations responsible for distributing them.

So, the IP organizations headed the problem off by getting the next generation of IP addresses (IPv6) available to the world. This time, there’d be no chance of coming close to running out of IP addresses again. (Although, we’ve heard that before).

And because of all the organizations involved with keeping tabs on the internet, TCP/IP protocols and everything else, there wasn’t a true panic to rush the effort in order to provide plenty of new, available IP addresses. The committees that were responsible for ensuring the running of the internet had thankfully planned ahead.

A little bit about IPv6 addresses

IPv6 addresses are longer, which the way things work out, means there can be trillions of them available.

To start with, they are made up of 128 bits—IPv4 addresses are only 32 bits. Because of its 128-bit format of the IPv6 address, the Internet will not run out of them ever. Let’s contrast: The number of IPv4 addresses (that were set to exhaust themselves at 4.3 billion) to the IPv6 format that will make an almost innumerable number of IP addresses available.

How many? Here’s a breakdown of that number:

• 340 x 10 to the power of 36
• That calculates to 3,400,000,000,000³⁶
• That generates a number that is referred to as 340 “undecillion”
• Another way to look at it: 340 trillion trillion trillion

WhatIsMyIPAddress.com lets you know if you’re using IPv6 or IPv4

As it turns out, IPv4 is very much still in use and will be around for a long time. Why don’t you go to the WhatIsMyIPAddress.com home page right now and see what type of IP address is active for your connection...and what it is.

WhatIsMyIPAddress.com was perhaps the first IP lookup website that was prepared to show visitors an IPv6 address if one was detected. That is why WhatIsMyIPAddress.com is truly one of the leading IP lookup websites on the internet. It is always up and running and able to show you your active, public-facing IP address on demand.

We’re here to help you understand the world of IP addresses, not make it more confusing.

For more information on IP addresses, just click on the link below and you’ll find a number of articles on the topic available, all written in non-technical easy-to-read language.

IP ADDRESSES