IP Addresses

DHCP Leases and Local IP Address Changes

A phone can disconnect from home Wi-Fi overnight and reconnect in the morning with the same local IP address. On another day, it may come back with a different one. Neither result necessarily indicates a fault. On networks that use DHCP, an address is commonly assigned as a lease rather than permanently attached to a device. DHCP, or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, supplies network configuration to clients. The assigned IP address is only one part of that configuration. A client can also receive information such as the subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS server addresses.