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Used for link-local addresses [5] between two hosts on a single link when no IP address is otherwise specified, such as would have normally been retrieved from a DHCP server 172.16.0.0/12 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255
A public IP address is a globally routable unicast IP address, meaning that the address is not an address reserved for use in private networks, such as those reserved by RFC 1918, or the various IPv6 address formats of local scope or site-local scope, for example for link-local addressing. Public IP addresses may be used for communication ...
Of the approximately four billion addresses defined in IPv4, about 18 million addresses in three ranges are reserved for use in private networks. Packets addresses in these ranges are not routable in the public Internet; they are ignored by all public routers. Therefore, private hosts cannot directly communicate with public networks, but ...
A special case of private link-local addresses is the loopback interface. These addresses are private and link-local by definition since packets never leave the host device. IPv4 reserves the entire class A address block 127.0.0.0 / 8 for use as private loopback addresses. IPv6 reserves the single address ::1.
In addition, network address translation (NAT) permits Internet service providers and enterprises to masquerade private network address space with only one publicly routable IPv4 address on the Internet interface of a main Internet router, instead of allocating a public address to each network device.
Some large / 8 blocks of IPv4 addresses, the former Class A network blocks, are assigned in whole to single organizations or related groups of organizations, either by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), or a regional Internet registry.
While IPv4 allows for a theoretical maximum of 2 32 addresses (approximately 4.3 billion), the number available for public use is smaller due to reserved blocks for private and special purposes. [ 2 ]
In support of link-local multicasts which do not use IGMP, any IPv4 multicast address that falls within the *.0.0.0 / 24 and *.128.0.0 / 24 ranges will be broadcast to all ports on many Ethernet switches, even if IGMP snooping is enabled, so addresses within these ranges should be avoided on Ethernet networks where the functionality of IGMP ...