How does 3G/Mobile phones get allocated an IP address? Does this mess with Google Analytics? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

How does a mobile phone get an IP address over 3G?

I'm going to guess that this all depends on your provider. I'm with Optus in Australia and my IP changes fairly frequently, but I've never really looked into "why".

Does this mess with google analytics and the unique visitor's value

Unique Visitors is determined by a cookie. If you turn on HTTP Headers in your favourite FireFox plugin you should be able to see it being sent. It usually looks something like __utma=(long string). So movement of IPs should not affect this. Especially as you can also have thousands of users represented by one public IP it would not be fair to use the IP for tracking uniqueness.

Solution 2:

Q1: Most 3G mobile providers uses a DHCP pools of private addresses and a NATed Internet access (for IPv4, this is the most flexible way to control the address allocation and Internet flows). Some corporate solutions can offer a pool a public addresses.

Q2: Google Analytics does not rely entirely on the IP address to collect statistics. It also uses User-Agent, cookies, etc.