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MAC address facts for kids

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UMTS Router Surf@home II, o2-0017
Label of an UMTS router with MAC addresses for LAN and WLAN modules

Devices that access a network need to be identified. For this reason, many network technologies, like Ethernet, use unique addresses to identify the network card, which is used to access the network. These addresses are usually called the Media Access Control address or MAC address.

Each device is assigned a MAC address by its manufacturer. The original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme is still used to assign MAC addresses. It allows MAC addresses to be 48-bits long. So, there are 248 (or 281,474,976,710,656) possible MAC addresses. MAC addresses identify many things, such as the type of device being used.

A MAC address is mainly used by a switch to direct the data to the right place almost like a home address. The IP is the road name and the MAC address is the door number

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Dirección MAC para niños

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