Re: what about 48 bits?

[Scott Howard <scott () doc net au>]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
> > The IEEE expects the MAC-48 space to be exhausted no sooner than the year
> > 2100[3]; EUI-64s are not expected to run out in the foreseeable future.
>
> And this is what happens when you can use 100% of the bits on "endpoint
> identity" and not waste huge sections of them on the decision bits for
> "routing topology".

Having around 4 orders of magnitude more addresses probably doesn't hurt
either...

Although even MAC-48 addresses are "wasteful" in that only 1/4 of them are
assignable to/by vendors, with the other 3/4 being assigned to multicast and
local addresses (the MAC equivalent of RFC1918)

  Scott.