LAN Static IP Address

[corrie]

Hello,

I had a very interesting discussion yesterday, with a BT technician, regarding a few issues I had with my BT Hub router. One of the issues I had was that I could not nominate a static IP address within my LAN.

The technical advisor explained to me, that static IP addresses are only available to business customers, and not residential customers, but as I went on to explain to him that, within my LAN (not my External IP address) I should be free to nominate which devices should have a static IP address, and not have my devices randomly changing IP addresses. I accept that BT charge for external static IP addresses.

The Technical advisor had no answer to my query, so I wondered if anybody here could shed any light, on why BT are restricting the use of static IP addresses within a residential user's LAN.

Thank you

[licquorice · Accepted solution]

First of all being pedantic, you can only allocate a static IP address on the device itself. If you wish the router to allocate the same address each time to a device, that is address reservation which the home hub supports. Just select 'always use this IP address' in advanced network settings for the device in question

[Les-Gibson]

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They're not.

There are already 63 static IP addresses available on the LAN side of the router. You can, if you wish, expand this by reducing the size of the DHCP pool from the IPv4 configuration tab at My Network

[licquorice]

Indeed.

The default IP scheme for the home hub is the addresses 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.63 are available to be used as static IP addresses on devices and are not part of the DHCP pool. The remaining addresses 192.168.1.64 - 192.168.1.253 are allocated by DHCP and can have address reservation applied. This schema can be modified to increase or decrease the DHCP pool if required.

[corrie]

I have just looked at my router again, (My Network) (then a device), and tried to do what I attempted to do yesterday, i.e. try to enable a static IP address to the very same device. When I then attempted to change the NO tab to yes (it remained greyed out) 

But after reading these few posts, I tried again, and found that I could indeed change the setting to static. I wonder if the router had a glitch or something else was stopping me from doing what I wanted.

Thank you for these very useful contributions. The Technical advisor, I spoke to, certainly had nothing further to add when I asked him about what I thought was a restriction.

It would have been helpful, if he told me that you could indeed change this setting, and that the router should have been rebooted or something similar to resolve the problem I had no idea at the time existed.

I think that I will leave the post up (my first) just in case anybody runs into this false problem so that they may see that you can actually select static IP addresses to any device you wish.

Thanks once again

[Direx]

Interestingly I changed the lease time to 21 days and all my connected devices turned to static IP addresses. The option is still greyed out though.