I am going to start working from home soon, and my boss said that I have to make my IP private. I called Time Warner Cable, and they suggested buying a whole new service plan with a different type of IP, but my boss said I can just get a router with, "at least one ethernet connection in place and must display a private IP address" and the IP should "begin with at least a 160.xxxxx" ??? Help??!!! What should I buy / do?

Ok I'm not sure what your boss is on, but I would avoid having a sip of his drink, or taking a drag off his cigarette. 160.xxx.xxx.xxx is NOT a private address. They are as follows: Class A: 10.0.0.0 Class B: 172.16.0.0 Class C 192.168.0.0 As for the making your public IP private, you can't. Your ISP may be able to assign you a private IP, but it would depend on their network and how it's setup. Most do use private IP's already for their highspeed. You can find out what your IP is by going to www.whatsmyip.com and checking. I'm not sure exactly what it is your boss wants you to do and I'm thinking he probably doesn't know either from the sounds of it as a real IT person would be able to speak clearly and concisely about the subject matter and it would be language I speak and understand. What you've posted makes no sense. So I think you need to get the bossman to explain more clearly. In my experience, when employees work from home, they generally connect to work through a VPN connection of some sort. My wife works from home. When she needs to connect to the company network, she fires up her VPN client software, which is preconfigured by their IT guy, and clicks on "connect" and voila! she's in. I suspect your provider was as confused by your request as I was but was more than willing to sell you a much more expensive highspeed package just to make some more $$$ off of you. I highly recommend you talk to an IT person at work. Have them write out what you need. Post it in here. We'll advise you. Then, if need be, you can contact your provider and you'll be able to tell them exactly what you need and you won't get ripped off by them too.

I have to think you are going to connect via vpn client. This is software you install on your laptop/pc and you can use [in the case of a laptop] anywhere you can get an internet connection. You don't need to be "private" to do that though having a router does add some protection from the internet. As CurtR advises talk to your IT dept. I am sure they can get you properly setup.

Thanks, guys. The person from my company giving me all of this info is actually my recruiter...she said they can't ship me the company PC until i have a private IP address. Holy moly, this is frustrating. I'm sorry that my post didn't make sence...none of this makes sense to me, actually. I need a freaking cinco de mayo Corona or something. I give up.