Why are my two Android device IP addresses only one digit apart?

[btraven]

I have a Nexus 7 2013 and a Moto G 2gen. The IP addresses are only one digit apart--the last one. What's up with that? On my laptop the IP address is completely different. This is all on home WiFi, not mobile data.

 

[raptir]

Are you possibly looking at the local network IP address for your phones and the public IP address for your laptop? Local address are in the form 192.168.x.x.

 

[btraven]

Yeah, I am. The two devices are 192 and the laptop is 174. Does that mean that the two devices are tied somehow to my home wifi and they are one digit apart because I have more than one? On the two devices, below the IP number there are three more numbers, identified as fe80, fe38, fe38 with long strings after them. All of these are different from each other and from the other device.

 

[Rukbat]

As you connect devices to your home router, they're assigned IP addresses in sequence, so the first one will get (as an example) 192.168.1.2 (.1 is the router itself, .0 is a reserved address). The next device to connect will be given 192.168.1.3, and so on. The external IP address is the one for your ISP, not for your home network, and the external addresses of all your devices connecter to your router will be the same. (That's what a router is - it splits one external address into 253 internal addresses. The same box also has a switch and a wifi access point, but the box is called a router, even though that's only one part of it.)

Your laptop has an address in this same range. ALL of the devices connected to your router also have an external address - and it's going to be the same one for all of them - it's the address your router was assigned by your ISP when it connected to the cable. That's probably the address you're looking at in your laptop - the address that What's My IP Address? - Obsolete Browser Page will give you for all your devices (called your external address).

Devices don't have their own IP addresses, they're given IP addresses by the router they're connected to. If you connect in a different order (say the laptop first, then the tab, then the phone, instead of the phone, then the laptop, then the tab), the numbers will switch around. If you connect to a public wifi you might get an address in the 192.168 range, or the 172.16 range or the 10 range. Those are all reserved for "internal" or LAN addresses (referred to as a private network).

The fe80:xxxx addresses are IPv6 addresses, which aren't in use on the internet yet, but if and when the internet switches over, our devices will just switch to those addresses - you won't notice the change unless you look. (IPv4 has a much smaller number of addresses available than IPv6, because IPv6 uses a larger number [there are more numbers in the range of 1-10,000 than there are in the range of numbers from 1-100], and we're ging to run pout of IPv4 addresses in the future. Then no more websites - or IPv6.) You can ignore those numbers for the near future.

 

[btraven]

Very nice, thank you, that was a big, BIG help.