High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In the Internet addressing architecture, a private network is a network that uses private IP address space, following the standards set by RFC 1918 and RFC 4193. These addresses are commonly used for home, office, and enterprise local area networks (LANs), when globally routable addresses are not mandatory, or are not available for the intended network applications. Private IP address spaces were originally defined in an effort to delay IPv4 address exhaustion, but they are also a feature of the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6.