Skinny IP Adresses

Every broadband connection has an IP address.

Think of this like your postal address on the internet for data traffic. The address is provided as part of your connection and most of the time you don’t need to worry anything about it.

Rather than assign each connection a unique IP address, Skinny’s Wireless Broadband service uses a pool of IP addresses and a system called ‘Carrier Grade – Network Address Translation (CG-NAT)’ to share these addresses amongst multiple users.  This enables us to conserve the amount of IP addresses we need.

What does this mean for me?

Generally, you won’t notice any differences. 

The systems are designed so you can still browse, stream, email, work, and play, and generally use the internet without any issues.

However, there are some applications and ways of working which might not work as well with CG-NAT. For example, you can’t port-forward (this is generally not recommended anyway as it poses security risks) or run large numbers of concurrent connections.

For example, some file sharing applications download files from hundreds of different users around the world, and thus use higher numbers of concurrent connections. Extreme use of any software which uses a large number of concurrent connections may not work optimally. 

Additionally, users with very large households or businesses with a high number of users may also generate a high number of concurrent connections.   

If this applies to you then Skinny recommends you consider using a Fibre, ADSL or VDSL plan instead.

Skinny does not offer dedicated IP addresses.