Default Password

192.168.1.1

192.168.1.1 is the most popularly used private IP Address to identify a device in a private network. But, what does that exactly mean?

The Concept of Private IP Address

To understand it clearly, you should grasp the idea of private IP Addresses. You must definitely be knowing about the IP Address, which is nothing but a combination of four set of numbers, separated by three dots (.). Something like 212.23.214.43. All these numbers are between 0 and 255. This combination of numbers is used to identify a device on the Internet.

In early days of Internet, it was thought of assigning a unique IP Address for each and every device connected on the network. No two devices could have the same address. But soon, the concept had to be modified because of the shear number of devices which got hooked up to it.

It led to the concept of Private Networks, which were connected to the Internet through a gateway. The private networks, within themselves are required to follow the scheme of unique IP address for each device connected. However, that IP address can be used by some other IP address within itself.

The convention led to reserving a range of IP Addresses to be used as Private IP Addresses, which are as given below.

Private IP Address 192.168.1.1 is part of the last range of IP Addresses. These IP addresses are not used in the Public domain.

When any of these devices, which is assigned a private IP within its private network, wants to communicate with another device through Internet, it has to use a gateway. The gateway is one of the device on this network, which is also assigned an IP address in the public domain. All the other computers connected to the Internet, can easily identify the gateway because of its public IP address and then the gateway identifies the particular device through the private IP Address.

Advantages of Private IP Addresses Like 192.168.1.1

The obvious advantage of using private address space for the Internet at large is to conserve the globally unique address space by not using it where global uniqueness is not required.

Enterprises themselves also enjoy a number of benefits from their usage of private address space: They gain a lot of flexibility in network design by having more address space at their disposal than they could obtain from the globally unique pool. This enables operationally and administratively convenient addressing schemes as well as easier growth paths.

192.168.1.1 Administration

192.168.1.1 is nowadays the most popularly used private IP address by the manufacturers of the routers. This is the default IP Address, which is configured in the firmware of the routers at the time of manufacturing. A user can easily change it through its settings. It makes the management of routers and changing of the settings very simple and easy to remember.

In case, somebody forgets the IP address configured to a router, all he has to do is to restore the factory settings, which is often through a hardware push button provided on the body of the router. The router then returns to its default IP setting, which is often 192.168.1.1. Then it can be accessed through a web browser by pointing to the URL http://192.168.1.1 in the address bar. Before allowing the access, the system will often ask for the username and password and then you are all through the play with the settings.

192.168.1.1 Video

Here is a Youtube video, which shows how to access your router through 192.168.1.1 private IP Address.