Tools to See the Public IP of Our Internet Connection

The first thing we are going to do is clarify concepts to lay our foundations and have a good starting point. Therefore, knowing the IP classes and what information they reveal about us is where we will start.

IP classes and what information they reveal about us

The IP address is a logical and unique identifier for each of the computers connected to a network. Currently most of the networks are IPv4, but because we need more and more IPs, we will be migrating to IPv6 networks. This is because we have more and more devices connected to the Internet. In that sense, the IoT (internet of things) is going to cause us to have more and more devices in our home network, also smartphones when using mobile data require an IP address necessarily. This is causing the IPs of the IPv4 networks to be completely exhausted, and we will have to migrate to IPv6 networks soon.

When it comes to IPs, there are two different types:

• Private IP
• Public IP

The private IP addresses are what identify each of the devices connected to our local network that are behind the NAT. In this case, it refers to each of the IP addresses that the router grants to our PC, smartphone, tablet or Smart TV or Android TV device. The router’s DHCP service will be in charge of assigning them automatically unless:

1. Let’s assign another one manually in the TCP / IP of Windows or of the device.
2. In the router, in the corresponding section, we could also assign a fixed IP, in the “Static DHCP” section.

Now we are going to put a practical example of private IPs. For example, the IP 192.168.1.1 would be our gateway, it is the IP of the router and there we will send our requests to, later, give them access to the Internet through our public IP. Then we would have 192.168.1.20 which could be a PC connected by network cable and 192.168.1.33 could be a smartphone connected to our WiFi network.

Regarding the public IP, we could define it as the identifier of our network facing the Internet. In this case, it is the one we have assigned to our router in the Internet WAN section. An important difference is that this public IP you cannot put the one you want, the one in charge of establishing it is your Internet provider or ISP.

Also, within the public IP we can say that we have two classes:

• The static public IP, which never changes and will always be the same, is associated with your Internet service.
• The dynamic public IP, that means that it can vary when the router is turned off, or after a period of time designated by our provider.

Currently, the vast majority of clients have a dynamic public IP. Generally, a static IP is hired by companies that need to set up their own web or FTP server. These types of connections have a small extra charge for having that static IP contracted, depending on the operator the price is higher or lower.

To end this section, we are going to explain what our public IP says about us, anyone who knows it could:

1. Know our Internet provider.
2. Get an approximate location of where we are.
3. Doing a port scan I could deduce if we have hosted the server of some kind.

Before starting with the list of tools to know the public IP, we must talk about CG-NAT. CG-NAT is a technology that allows the operator to use a public IP and provide its clients with private IP addressing, therefore, we will not be able to have access from the Internet to our local network servers, even if we have opened the ports on our router, because CG-NAT will prevent it. It is very important that your Internet connection has a public IP address and not an IP in the CG-NAT range, because if not, you will have quite a few problems, especially if you are going to set up a web server, FTP, VPN or play online. Operators have implemented this technology to save public IP addresses, and we currently have a general exhaustion of IPv4 addresses as we have explained previously.

Whoer.net and the information offered by our public IP

Now we are going to start with the tools to see your public IP. As we mentioned before, we will do it through our web browser to make it very easy and understandable. One of the most popular and informative is Whoer.net . To access the web you simply have to click on the link in bold on the name of the web. Once done, you will provide us with the following information:

From this data we could get our public IP which in this case has the peculiarity that it is static. Also data related to our software, here we appreciate that we have Windows 10 as the operating system. In addition, it tells us that we use Google Chrome in version 84.0. As for the ISP that we have contracted, we see that this line is from Telefónica. However, if we scroll down it still offers us much more information.

In this case we have opted for the extended version because it offers much more information. Next, we will show the most important sections.

In the IP address section it shows practically the same information that we had at the beginning. Regarding SCRIPTOS, it indicates that we have JavaScript and WebRTC enabled on our PC. On the other hand, in the social networks section, it detects that we have a Gmail account and another of the Google services such as YouTube.

As for the interactive detections section, it will indicate our IP address, that we have Windows 10 and that our language is Spanish.

Regarding the screen, he tells us that we have a 24 bit color depth and its resolution.

The location section is one of the most interesting and offers us more information.

From here we can extract a more exact location. In addition to the country, it offers us a region (Autonomous Community) which in this case is Madrid and a city (municipality) which is Parla. As for the city, it is not always correct and places you in a nearby municipality. Finally, we have the plugins and browser sections.

Here we can see that the browser is Google Chrome and that one of its plugins allows us to read PDF files.

See my public IP with which-es-mi-ip.net and more

Another tool to see your public IP that we can use is which-es-mi-ip.net . If we click on the link in bold above, we will be able to know it along with other additional information. This is an example of the information that we are going to obtain:

Here to begin we know that the public IP is 213.97.xx and that the operator is Telefónica de España. In addition, he tells us that it is static, from Spain and that we do not navigate through a proxy. However, we can still obtain more information by clicking on Geolocate IP . Then it will offer us a more precise location by locating us in Madrid in the town of Parla as well, like the previous tool.

My ip.com

Among the tools to see your public IP we have another website that we could count on is myip.com . If we click on the link in bold we obtain the following data.

Here we could see our public IP, Host and internet operator of the connection we are using. Also below it offers the following information:

• Operating system.
• Internet navigator.
• Screen resolution.

Speedtest.es and other services

Another tool to see your public IP that we can use is speedtest.es . If we click on the link we will obtain results like these:

There we obtain our public IP which is 213.97.xx and also the ISP which is Telefónica. As for the location, as on previous occasions, it has located us in Spain in the town of Parla (Madrid). On the other hand, if we click on Measure your speed we can do a test to check that the upload and download speed corresponds to the one we have contracted.

Finally other tools to see your public IP that we could use are:

• Miip.es.
• What is my ip publica.com .
• What is my ip.com .
• See my ip.es.

As you have seen, it is very easy to see what our public IP address is, we simply have to use these websites with our browser, however, we could also enter directly into our router and go to the “WAN IP Address” section and we it will put the IP address in the WAN that we have, if this IP address corresponds to the public IP address that we have seen on the different websites, it means that our operator is not using CG-NAT.