"blah" wrote in message
...
IMM wrote:
"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...

Your ignorance of computing abounds. IP address are dynamic and
that of the local ISP, not individual machines. So many people
could have the same IP address at many times. Duh!

Not actually true.

ISPs with dial up users will typically, but not necessarily have a
dynamic address pool for those users. They may also assign dynamic
addresses for the cheaper DSL packages.

I can appreciate that that is possibly what you have.

The more expensive "broadband" packages allocate the customer one
static IP address and may on request provide a larger block if
needed.

No ISP allocates one IP address to one individual user, unless it is
a large user. IP addresses are scarce, very scare. One of the big
problems of TC/IP is that the addressing stinks, although this is
being worked on.

My ISP has given me a whole (small) block of fixed static routable
public IP addresses. I am only large in the physical sense of the
word....



This is true. An ISP on a decent broadband package will give you a static
IP address or a small range of IP addresses.

Users who have the most basic of broadband services will get allocated a
unique IP address that is leased for 24 hours before being returned to the
pool of IP addresses for reallocation. Normally you will get the same IP
address back though even though you are on dynamic IP addressing. As the
number of IP addresseses are getting low then the IP ranges that are
allocated to internal networks are being freed up for ISP usage. A typical
example would be the 82.X.X.X range of IP addresses that are now being used
by ISPS. No 2 internet users can have the same IP address though.

The new IP addresses (that I believe windows XP can handle) basically have
six numbers in its range of X.X.X.X.X.X rather than the current arrangement
of X.X.X.X.

Andrew.



Andrew.