How to Check Your ISP (Internet Service Provider): 2026 Guide

What is an ISP

The abbreviation ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Your ISP is the organization that provides you with services and tools, such as a router, which allow you to connect to the internet.

ISPs also manage your internet access. They direct traffic between you and the online services you access, maintain infrastructure, and provide you with an IP address, which serves as your online ID.

As there are various types of internet services, service providers also differ in their specialization and scope. For example, a company that provides hosting services, necessary to put a website online, is also technically an internet service provider.

Most people, however, actually refer to Internet Access Providers as Internet Service Providers – the companies that get you online. For private users accessing the web, an internet provider usually matters in three cases. First, there is your home internet provider – the company that provides internet access at your home address.

Then, there are mobile providers. Your mobile internet provider is the company that keeps your mobile device connected to the internet wherever you go. Instead of routers and cables, mobile internet providers rely on cellular towers to ensure wireless access.

Finally, when you are in public places, such as coffee shops or libraries, you might be using their public Wi-Fi. While this access is provided to you by those managing the place, it is ultimately provided by an internet service provider.

All of these services can be provided by the same company. The biggest ISPs often provide various types of access. In the USA, the best-known such ISPs include Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast.

How to Check Who Your ISP Is?

Your home internet provider is almost always billing you each month for access. So, you can simply check the bill for their name. Additionally, their name might be printed on the router they have provided you.

In some cases, for example, when using public internet, physical checkups or bills may not be available. Then you can use your device’s IP address to find out which ISP is providing the access.

There are websites online that will tell you your IP address, such as WhatIsMyIPAddress. You should also be able to find it in your internet settings. Once you have your IP address, you can look it up in an online IP database to find the associated provider.

A more authoritative approach is the formal IP–ISP mapping. In this case, you check the IP address not in just any online database, but in the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) – the official source for information about which specific IP ranges belong to which providers.

Alternatively, you can skip the IP checkup altogether and use an online ISP lookup website. Just search “who is my ISP” on Google or another search engine, and it should direct you to an online ISP lookup website. Such an ISP tool can automatically display your IP and ISP information as your browser accesses the website, without you having to do anything else.

How to Check ISP on Mobile vs Wi-Fi

If you are using your mobile device to check your ISP, the result might differ depending on whether you are using mobile data or Wi-Fi. Most of the time, your home network provider and your mobile carrier are different companies.

When you use Wi-Fi at home, you are connecting to your home network. The IP address will therefore be the same as that of other devices connected to the network, for example, your computer.

When you use mobile data, your mobile internet service provider assigns the session IP address from its IP pool. These providers assign dynamic IP addresses to users as they connect to the internet, which means that you might be seeing a different address with every connection.

When using home Wi-Fi, the IP address will be more stable. It can also change when you reboot the router or when your internet service provider assigns a different IP address to your home network. But this might happen only once in a few days, weeks, or even months.

To check who your home internet service provider is on your mobile device, turn off mobile data and connect to your home Wi-Fi. If you are using a VPN, make sure to disconnect it, as it changes your IP address. Then run the online ISP lookup as described above.

To find out who your mobile carrier is, disconnect from Wi-Fi and enable mobile data. Once again, make sure you are not connected to a VPN at the time, then run the ISP lookup.

Why Knowing Your ISP Matters?

Your internet service provider is the link between you and the internet. Whenever you access websites, you are sending and receiving data. All that data passes through your ISP.

Different ISPs use this position differently. They might have different privacy policies and log more or less data about your online activity. ISPs can also either sell aggregated user data or not.

Knowing your ISP helps you learn more about its privacy policy, any previous incidents involving user data, and the company itself, and helps you decide what is best for your security. Since they know quite a bit about you, it is a good idea to know them as well.

Your ISP can see your IP address, the IPs of the websites you connect to, the frequency and volume of your traffic, and metadata. If they provided the router/modem, even more data may be available to them. This is even if the traffic is secured with HTTPS or TLS.

With encryption, such as when using a VPN, the ISP cannot see the website content, the request destination, and won’t be able to track your internet activity. Yet even without the data you share, metadata remains visible.

From metadata, your ISP can tell what services you access and when, your internet usage patterns, and where most of your bandwidth goes. A lot can be inferred from such information. Thus, for your own security, you should know who has access to it and what their policies are.

ISP vs IP Address

The letters ISP and IP are often encountered together, along with other abbreviations. Thus, a brief reminder about how they are connected might be useful.

ISP stands for Internet Service Provider, which is the company that provides you with the internet and internet-related services. One of the things you get from your ISP is your unique online identification, known as an IP address.

IP stands for Internet Protocol, a set of rules that govern how data travels across the internet. The Internet Protocol (IP) also defines the format for IP addresses.

For more than 5 decades, we have used version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), which provides the familiar IP address format, consisting of numbers separated by periods: 192.168.1.1.

Using such a format, however, one can only generate around 4.3 billion unique addresses. Enough for many things, but not for identifying the ever-growing number of internet users.

IPv6 is being deployed to address the shortage of addresses and uses a hexadecimal format with both numbers and letters. Such an address can look like this: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.

Finally, it is important to distinguish an IP address from an ASN, which stands for Autonomous System Number. An autonomous system is a large network made up of IP networks and routers managed by a single entity, such as an ISP.

Each such network has a unique numerical identifier that distinguishes it from other networks that make up the global internet. ASNs have various types and formats.

Can Your ISP Track You?

Your ISP can track you to some extent, depending on the legal requirements in your jurisdiction and what you do online. But tracking is not done in real-time. Rather, they automatically log data about your online activity, usually without anyone even looking at the data unless requested to.

Commonly, logs include your assigned IP address and the destination IP address, the time and duration of connections, the amount of data transferred, and metadata, such as the protocol used.

What ISPs can see depends on whether your connection uses HTTP or HTTPS. HTTP does not encrypt traffic. Your ISP can see everything, including website content and form data. Because of security concerns, HTTP is not recommended.

HTTPS provides more privacy and security. It encrypts traffic, making form data and page content invisible to the ISP.

Your ISP also provides you with DNS, which translates between IP addresses and domain names. If you are using the provided DNS, your ISP can track every domain you visit.

To increase your security and privacy, you can use an encrypted DNS instead. It only allows the ISP to see the destination IP, but not the domain name immediately.

How to Hide or Change Your ISP

There are two main options for hiding or changing your ISP: a virtual private network (VPN) or a proxy.

A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between you and the website through which your traffic flows. When you connect to a VPN, it provides you with a different public IP address. It is associated with the VPN provider, not your internet provider. Thus, your actual ISP remains hidden.

A proxy is an intermediary server between you and the website. Instead of going straight to the website, your traffic first passes through a proxy with a different IP address than yours. This IP address is what the website sees instead of yours.

Changing the IP address also changes what the website sees as your ISP. The key difference between a proxy server and a VPN is that proxies don’t encrypt your traffic. Thus, they hide your IP and ISP from the website, but they don’t hide what you do online from your ISP. Therefore, in most cases, one should use a VPN for more privacy and security.

These methods, of course, only hide your ISP for the duration of the session. To actually change your internet service provider, you need to stop using their services and sign up with another provider.