Why does Xender use the 192.168.xxx.xxx for communication?
Published: 2022-01-02 15:36:30

As a web developer, you must have come across the address 192.168.x.x before, but what does this all mean in our internet system and why is it so important?

Before we go deep into this discussion, you need to understand what happened in the early days of the internet.

Back in the days when computers were still a new thing and the internet was still developing, a lot of organizations wanted to join the growing trend of connecting several computers together, to leverage on the new technology of computers and not just that, be able to transfer their work from one work desk to another; So everyone created his own internet (LAN). But problem arose when these private internets wanted to communicate with other internets – WAN(generally known as INTERNET; the largest implementation of WAN). At some point, the IETF also report this case so this gave birth to the [rfc 1918](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1918). 

A network is identified by two or more devices connected to each other, when these devices are connected to each other, the device which created the network hereby called the host/server assigns numbers to each device, lets say 1, 2, 3,.... but in this case 1, 2, 3,... may not make any meaning so they came up with the idea of IP Addresses; something like 123.456.7.8. This looks better right? Yea, sure. 

So these numbers are assigned to every device in a company, lets say Microsoft. Now these connected devices can communicate with each other and know the identity of each other fairly. But what happens when one wants to talk to another computer outside the Microsoft network? One would suggest that he simply joins the other network, then? Unfortunately, things don’t work that way.

It was also common that some computers in one organization had the same IP address with another computer in another organization. This caused a routing issue. This was a lifetime disaster.

The IETF has assigned the range of the IP Addresses to be used as private IPs. 
10.0.0.0        -   10.255.255.255  (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0      -   172.31.255.255  (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0     -   192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

In practice, it means that organisations who wants to make a peer to peer or local connection can choose IP addresses from these range and should never go to the public internet. This has given the implementation which makes xender and other routers switch any addresses within the range of 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255.  Most routers have chosen the 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.8.1 as their fixed IP to configure the admin settings for their routers.

## So why then does xender choose the 192.168.x.x block?

By permutation, it can be summed up that the Class A (10.0.0.0) block can connect up to 16,777,216 devices, the Block B up to 1,048,576 and the Block C 65,536. By no means have we ever seen a common router address up to 65,000 devices, moreover, mobile devices are not made for that purpose. This information is known to networking manufacturers and for that purpose, they choose to preserve the memory space which will be allotted and go for the minimum.