January 3, 2019

What is the difference between an IP address and an IP number?

Commonly, there have been many misunderstandings done by interchanging these two names with each other by lots of people, there is indeed a key difference between these two. Basically, An IP number block is a group of conterminous numbers with a particular starting number. In IPversion 4 the protocol & the size of a number block can be as small as a single number, which than would be referred as a /32 block, or as large as the entire potential number range that is defined in the protocol. Actually, the largest IPv4 number blocks that are allocated to single entities are known as /8’s and thus contain 16,777,216 of the individual contiguous numbers. On the other hand, an IP address is a numerical label. For e.g., an IP number is assigned to each device like, a computer, a printer, or a router participating in an inter connected network that uses the Internet Protocol or “IP” for communication between the devices. Thus, when an IP number is assigned to a designate host computer or a particular network interface, then that particular number becomes an actual IP address.