Used by billions, understood by very few
NAT Explained – Network Address Translation
You may have heard of something called an IP address – if you haven’t, start by reading our article explaining the concept – but for this article on Network Address Translation (NAT), you need to know that IP addresses are limited. You also can’t have two devices on a network with the same IP address.
The problem is that different networks, such as your home network and computers on the Internet as a whole, inevitably have the same IP addresses or have incompatibilities in the way their network addresses are set up. NAT solved both the problem of IP address scarcity and incompatible networks that need to communicate with each other.
Most of the time it’s not something you need to worry about, but sometimes your internet problems are the result of a bug in NAT. So a basic understanding of what NAT is and how it works can help you solve the problem.
