When I type in ipconfig in the Command Prompt, I'm getting 192.168.x.x as my IPv4, and if I go to a site like whatismyipaddress.com, im getting something with 80.50.x.x
Why am I getting two different results?
43 Answers
This is not a question for .
If you do a little research about IPs, you will quickly see that 192.168.0.0/16 range is reserved for private networks. This mean it's not an address that can be seen from "the outside".
The IP shown by a website correspond to the IP of your connection endpoint. Typically this is the IP given by your ISP to your modem/router when it's connected to the internet.
The router is then free to dispatch traffic to a set of private IP addresses to allow multiple computers to use the same public IP.
The 192.168 address is the IP address of your machine in relation to your local network. For example, if I have my PC, my mobile device, and a console connected to my router, my PC might be 192.168.0.1 , my mobile device might be 192.168.0.2 and my console would then be 192.168.0.3 and so on.
Your local IP address only matters to your own router. If you were to go to someone else's house you'd probably find that their local IP address also begins with 192.168 starting with 192.168.0.1 and going up one by one for each device connected to the router.
On the other hand, the other IP address you gave is probably much greater than 0.1 or 0.2 , because that's the IP address in relation to your ISP. This is how other websites see your IP address - they do not care about your local IP address which is only important to your router, they want to know to which ISP the content should be delivered, and which user of that ISP, more specifically.
I'll give you an answer to left in clear why and how began:
The Private Address Reserved Pool has the origin with the scalability problem called IPv4 Address Exhaution (I personally recommend to read this article).
The basic explanation about you problem (is not a problem).
Is because you are behind a networking device (as SoHo Router) with a Local Area Network (With Private Addressing) and to comunicate your internal hosts with the WAN using methodology called NAT.
An ASCII diagram:
[WAN Provided for your ISP] <--> [NAT Metodology] <--> [Local Area Network]
IP ADDR:80.x.x.x(Public) IP ADDR:192.168.1.x(Private)The NAT metodology allows communication from your host to the wan and vice versa.
