

- #REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP HOW TO#
- #REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP LICENSE#
- #REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP WINDOWS#
IP Reservation is one of many uses of the MAC address.
#REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP LICENSE#
Specifically, you can’t register your vehicle (and get a new license plate) if it doesn’t have a VIN. Both are used to identify a car but at different levels and purposes. If MAC is the VIN of a car, then the IP address is the license plate. Once the device is yours, however, it’s a good idea to keep this address secure. It’s not a secret everyone can see it - again, it’s like the VIN of a car, it must be visible. Generally, a device has its MAC on its label. instead of their MAC addresses or the names you give them. For this reason, connected network devices are often identified within the network as the name of the vendor - such as Netgear, Hon Hai, Cisco, etc. MAC addresses are allocated in large groups to hardware vendors.Here are a few examples: Physical address, basic service set identifier (BSSID), Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address, and adapter address. There are many other names for a MAC address.But considering this is a 48-bit scheme with a total of 281,474,976,710,656 - that’s 281 trillion and then some hundred billion more - possible addresses, it’s safe to say many things more consequential, like humanity or hopefully just the need for the MAC itself, would expire before we have to worry about a MAC shortage.

#REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP WINDOWS#
That said, here is a MAC address as you’d see on a Windows computer: Depending on where you view the address, these groups are separated by colons, hyphens, or nothing at all.

If the device has more than one adapter, then each will have its own MAC address.Ī MAC address consists of six groups of two characters (numbers or letters). This NIC is available as a Wi-Fi adapter, an Ethernet adapter (wired), or a cellular modem.Īn actual device, like a phone or a computer, only has a MAC address when it has a network adapter. Your device - be it a computer, a tablet, or a phone - can connect to the Internet because it has a NIC. So a MAC address - I’ll call it MAC from now on for short - is precisely that, the unique identifier to control the access of a network interface controller (NIC), which we often call a network adapter.
#REASON FOR MAC ADDRESSES AND IP HOW TO#
