What Is Port Address Translation (PAT)?

What if you had to share one phone with everyone in your office? What if you had to share one computer with everyone in your building? Sounds pretty awful, right? Well, it's the same way when it comes to IP addresses. The problem is that we're running out of them—and a single public IP address can't be shared between multiple clients who need to use the Internet publicly. That's where port address translation (PAT) comes in. Port Address Translation (PAT) is a feature that allows many users on a private network to use a small number of IP addresses. Its basic function is to share a public IP address among clients who need to use the public Internet. An extension of Network Address Translation (NAT). Port address translation is also known as port congestion or port congestion. PAT is a trick that allows you to share one public IP address with multiple computers on your local network. It's a pretty cool trick, but it does have some limitations. When you set up PAT, you're telling your router to take incoming data from the Internet and send it to a typical computer on your LAN. That means that all of the computers in your LAN will be able to access anything in the outside world—as long as they know where to find it. So how does that work? When a computer on your LAN wants to access something in the outside world, instead of giving itself an IP address (like 192.168.1.2), it uses an IP address that identifies itself within your network (192.168.1). And because all of those computers use one public IP address (the one assigned by your ISP), they'll all be able to access whatever they need to connect with other computers using their internal addresses!