Does HughesNet provide a public IP address?

[grohgreg]

The NATed address your talking about is a public address...it's just not static.

Sure it's public, but it's not mine !! It's the address of the HughesNet NAT server through which my packets are translated for any given connection. The last octet changes regularly. What we as consumer grade customers get is what might be considered a "dynamic lease"; a temporary IP address between us and the NOC/NAT, that only lasts as long as the connection remains active. As such, it's considered a dynamic (or private) IP address. You don't have a clue what my "address" is behind the NAT server. Matter of fact, you might even liken the NAT server to a psuedo-firewall.

More to the point, packets between (consumer grade) customers and their assigned gateway servers are actually identified by the customer modem serial number (in hex) which is included in each packet header. The gateway server by the way, is not public - won't even respond to PINGs (from either direction). The gateway server is between the customer and the NAT server. By the time packets get to the NAT server, things get "public". But as I've repeated ad nauseum, the address at that point is no longer that of the customer. It's merely a means by which the NAT server knows through which gateway server the responding packets are routed back to the customer.

But this has strayed far afield from the original question. So once again - for the benefit of the OP - the default HughesNet residential/consumer grade (Home/SOHO) configuration provides the equivalent of a dynamic IP address in the price of the package. And - unless things change after their website reconfiguration - you should be able to order an optional static IP address for an additional $10/month.

//greg//

[poorboy08]

Excellent reply...although I was simply trying to address the way in which "Public" is being used. IMHO any address which is registered through IANA is considered public, where as IPs such as 192.168.xxx.xxx and 172.18.xxx.xxx would be considered private. Whether or not it's pingable or "static" makes no difference.

[bradleys]

OK, here's how it works. I just had a static IP address added yesterday.

I was using "private" to describe the "10", "172.16-31", and "192.168.0-255" ranges, which are also called "non-routed".

Without a static address, your PCs only see the 192.168.0.something address that is supplied via NAT from the modem. The modem has a public address that is dynamic. In my case, the public address was 97.something.

With a static address, your PC or router will see the public address. In my case the static address is 174.something.

It is not supported to have the modem pass through (bridge) the public address unless you buy a static IP address. This is different than both of my other internet services. In those other cases, I have a dynamic address that is assigned directly to the computer or router which is attached to the modem. Since my other two internet services DO allow public addresses to be passed even though they're dynamic, I suspect this is a marketing way for HughesNet to bump us up two plans, and get ten bucks for a static address.

I also had a previous wireless internet service where the IP address that I saw was a 10.something address. They were NAT-ing many users through a single DSL upstream connection.

So, to summarize - unless you rent a static IP address, the HughesNet modem will only operate in NAT mode, and your computers will not have visibility to the public address.

The reason I cared, and the reason this is important, is that it's much easier (at least for me) to set up inbound routing for cameras and computer services directly, rather than with doubled NAT.