Think about yourself, existing on the planet as a single entity. You have your name, fingerprint, and other aspects of your personality carefully tucked away of you. It is boring, and you spend all day kicking stones and discovering edible plants. Suddenly, you begin to see that there are a few other people in the planet like you. Even more exciting, you learn that there are a couple of people in other planets too, and there is a way to talk to them!
You begin talking to your new friends on your plant, forming a network in the process. In computing, the internet is made of billions of other networks connected together. Think of this as your network of friends in your planet, connected to other network of friends in other planets. You and your friends make up a PRIVATE NETWORK, and if you get to talk to you extraterrestrial friends in other planets, it would constitute a PUBLIC NETWORK.
There is just one 'but'. To communicate, you all have to be able to identify yourselves. (Imagine how awful it would be to call your new friends by strange names every time you meet because you don't know their name). In computing, this is where IP and MAC addresses comes in. IP stands for internet protocol. In simple terms, you can relate it to your name. I'll explain more about that in the course of this post. Your MAC address is your Fingerprint. MAC stands for media access control, and it is unique for every device, just like your fingerprint.
IP address comes in a set of numbers divided into 4 octets.
For example:
An IP address can either be Public or Private, as previously mentioned. A private IP address is the name you answer when you communicate with your friends in your planet. A public IP address is the name you answer when you talk to your extraterrestrial friends because that is what you can be identified with. In summary, the extraterrestrial friends identifies everyone from your planet with the SAME IP address. That's could be a little insensitive since you are not all the same people, but you belong to the same planet..oops! But hey, there is someone to blame for that. AND that ids your Internet Service Provider(ISP). They are responsible for assigning public IP addresses, because they help you connect to the internet- in this case, they help you communicate with your extraterrestrial friends.
Remember we mentioned that billions of networks exists. According to Cisco, there would be 50 billion connected devices by the end of 2021. People typically have more that one device which they connect to the internet. It is only normal to assume that IP addresses can be exhausted. Thankfully, there is a new addressing scheme known as the IPv6, where instead of four octets, there are 8 groups of four hexadecimal digits.
Example:
To understand more what all these numbers mean, I recommend you watch this . Thank you for reading!
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