Can an IP address change on its own?

Does your IP address stay the same on your phone?

I was talking to a friend about how much of an issue the IP is.

For instance, if my IP is different when I go on my phone and when I go on my computer it can be kind of an issue for me.

I've had a bit of trouble with it with one of the routers I had at home. My IP would change, and it didn't really work for me since it was a different IP address.

It's a very simple concept and it's just a number. It can be a long string of numbers or a short string. But the router needs to know where the web servers are so that it can tell them where to send traffic. So if you're using a different IP address you may have problems communicating with the website.

IP addresses are not static. Your IP address changes every time you access a site.

My last IP address changed a few months ago. I was having trouble connecting to some games online.

I think it was because I had to install some new updates on my phone and some weird software took over my phone. Because my IP changed, I had to contact my wireless provider and ask them to reset my IP so I could fix the problem. They did it for free because they knew that I had done nothing wrong and there was no data loss or anything.

So, basically, you change IP addresses often? Is it something that's common with you?

How often does a device IP change?

By John Strand, for the SANS Institute.

This year, the IP address of the device hosting the web site associated with this analysis changed. The original site hosted on has now been moved to a completely new web site hosted on For this analysis, only the static records are included. The data will be updated each year, and we will change the text used to represent the dynamic IP addresses accordingly. A table is available to provide this information when it is current. We will also note what year the data was taken, should you wish to have an accurate representation of how often IPv4 devices change their IP address.

The static IPv4 statistics are updated by John Strand. These data have been obtained from anonymised Google search and may change year to year if the owner of the website changes. It is not possible to determine the IP address of individual devices by the method of this study. The analysis assumes all IP addresses are hosted in residential homes using routers based on the following protocol stack;

Network Layer (OSI Layer 3): Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Internet Layer (OSI Layer 3): Internet Protocol (IP). Transport Layer (OSI Layer 4): User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Application Layer (OSI Layer 5): Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The data is grouped into the following data sets: Residential - Hosted in a home. Sensitive - Hosted in a private network or office. Public - Hosted in a data center or public IP address. Unclassified - Any IP address not associated with any of the previous 3 categories. A small number of data points are grouped into the Unclassified category because they can only be determined by using methods other than an IP address. They include servers not listed in or web servers that refuse to reveal their ownership, which in this case we have grouped with the Public category.

Unclassified Data Set. Residential 0 .002 % of traffic 0 .008 % of unique IPs 0 .011 % of total traffic 0 .