When people think of IP classes, they may automatically think of some sort of class that they can take on networking and computers. However, that is not the class that this is referring to. This is more or less referring to the different ‘classes’ or grades that the IP address of a network can be.

In order to truly understand the importance of these classes, the person must understand the use of the IP address. This is the address that each network must have in order to get onto the Internet. If it were not for the IP addresses, then no one would be able to access the wealth of information that we can access via the Internet.

With that being said, an easier way to think of these addresses is through the home that you live in. No one has the same address anywhere in the United States. If they did, then it would be rather hard to sort mail or even find a location via GPS. Thus, the same can be said of the network, each address is unique so that it can access the Internet without any problems or difficulties.

With that being said, there are five IP classes that the address can fall under. These are the class A, class B, class C, class D, and class E. Despite the fact that letters are used, this does not mean that one class is better than the other, which is sometimes what people automatically think when they see how these IP classes are separated.

Within each class, there are decimal numbers that are going to put a certain address in that class. For example, class A have a decimal number that is between 1 and 127. Therefore, if the IP address is one that the first numbers before the decimal point is 122.089, then the 122 is the class, and the person can assume from this information that they are getting a class A address.

The rest of the classes take their own numbers. Class B is 128 to 191; Class C 192 to 223; Class D 224 to 239 and then Class E is 240 to 255. For those that are wanting to know the class that their IP address falls into, this information is something that they must have in order to know.

With all of these being known, the person should realize that each jurisdiction all over the world is going to be given IP addresses with class numbers that are similar. For example, one part of the United States may fall under Class B, thus all the hosts that are originating in this area are going to be those that have Class B numbers for the IP address.