What is 192.168.1.1?

My friend called me up this weekend and asked me to help him setup his new router and his new broadband connection. He spent nice money and got himself a fancy 10MB per second broadband connection but little did he knew on how to configure his router and kick start accessing the Internet. 

First things first, the router has to be connected to the PC via the the Ethernet adapter, this is common in most new age computer systems. 

Next, the PC will identify the router connected to it in lightning speed. 

Now's the twister and the whole meaning of this post's title revealed. The router configuration. I simply typed in 192.168.1.1 and accessed the router's admin page via a default username and password - known to most who have experience in configuring routers. Then I entered the admin area of the router and configured the other required information. 

After I was all done, my friend asked me only one question - just what in the world is 192.168.1.1. The answer is quite simple; it is one of the private IP addresses allocated for only private or internal usage - from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255. In short, only one "local device" inside a private network can have a private IP address and 192.168.1.1 is one such. I then advised my friend to read more about 192.168.1.1 at a dedicated website on the Internet and get good knowledge on how it is really done.