What Is Network Address Translation (NAT)?

NAT is like a game of very fun musical chairs, but played with computers and the internet. When you want to communicate over the internet, you need to ensure that you're on the same page with everyone else, that all of your computers are using the same language and know how to interpret each other's words. There are many more people using the internet than there are computers, which means there isn't enough room for everyone to have their unique IP address (the unique number assigned to each computer). So what do we do? Well, we get creative! We take all those computers that need to talk over the internet and give them all one main IP address. Then we tell them: "Hey guys, when you're talking through, just pretend it's your own personal IP address instead." When they respond, we'll translate whatever they say into something that makes sense for our main IP address. NAT is a solution to the problem of public IP addresses. Public IP addresses are used by public networks and can only be given to one user at a time. This means that if multiple users access the same network, each user needs their own public IP address, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain. NAT manages multiple client requests over one private IP address required by public networks. At NAT's center is the router, which hides actual public network addresses and readdresses them with a new public IP address. This unique address may appear to be that of the router for external networks, although this is not the case. This way, everything works out pretty seamlessly. You can have millions of people talking through one main IP address without any trouble at all!