IPv4

How it is used

Said 'eye-pee-vee-four'. It is still the most common version in offices and homes. Because the supply of public IPv4 addresses has run out, operators rely on NAT and private address ranges, and companies buy or lease IPv4 blocks.

Example sentences

1. We only have eight public IPv4 addresses, so most services sit behind NAT.

2. The old devices support IPv4 only, so we can't switch it off yet.

Common collocations

• IPv4 address
• IPv4 exhaustion
• IPv4 block
• public IPv4 address

Related terms

• IPv6Version 6 of the Internet Protocol, which uses 128-bit addresses written as groups of hexadecimal digits separated by colons, such as 2001:db8::1, giving an almost unlimited number of addresses.
• IP addressA unique numerical label given to every device on an IP network so that data can be sent to it, for example 192.168.1.20 in IPv4.
• NATShort for network address translation: a method in which a router or firewall rewrites the addresses in packets, typically so that many devices with private addresses can share one public IP address.
• private IP addressAn IP address from the ranges reserved for internal networks, such as 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16, which cannot be routed on the public internet.
• CIDRShort for Classless Inter-Domain Routing: the system of writing an IP network as an address plus a prefix length, such as 192.168.0.0/22, which replaced the old fixed address classes.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• IPv4 · Software Engineering

More terms: IP Addressing

• subnet
• default gateway
• subnet mask
• static IP address
• port forwarding