What Is The Mac Address Used For

Both MAC Address and IP Address are used to uniquely defines a device on the internet. NIC Card’s Manufacturer provides the MAC Address, on the other hand Internet Service Provider provides IP Address.

What Is An Mac Address
What Is Mac Address Mean
What Is The Mac Address Used For Ipv4 Multicast
What Is The Mac Address Used For

In computer networking, the Media Access Control (MAC) address is every bit as important as an IP address. Learn in this article how MAC addresses work and how to find the MAC addresses being used by a computer. What Is a MAC Address? The MAC address is a unique value associated with a network adapter. Your Media Access Control address, or MAC address, is a unique 12-character code (for example 00:00:00:00:00:0X) that your device uses to identify itself when connecting to a network. When you register it on My WiFi, your device will automatically connect. A MAC address does not change when you connect to the internet from different locations, it is part of the network interface card inside your device. A MAC address is made up of 48 bits, shown as 6 groups of hexadecimal digits. A MAC address may look like: 00 12 0E A6 B0 68. The first half of a MAC address will identify the manufacturer of the. “MAC” stands for “Media Access Control,” this address is used to identify your device. The MAC address assigns to your network adapter. You need this to be able to use the Internet via LAN or WLAN. The 12-digit code is displayed in the hexadecimal system and is unique to your device. The first six digits indicate from which manufacturer.

The main difference between MAC and IP address is that, MAC Address is used to ensure the physical address of computer. It uniquely identifies the devices on a network. While IP address are used to uniquely identifies the connection of network with that device take part in a network.

Let’s see the difference between MAC Address and IP Address:

S.NO	MAC Address	IP Address
1.	MAC Address stands for Media Access Control Address.	IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address.
2.	MAC Address is a six byte hexadecimal address.	IP Address is either four byte (IPv4) or six byte (IPv6) address.
3.	A device attached with MAC Address can retrieve by ARP protocol.	A device attached with IP Address can retrieve by RARP protocol.
4.	NIC Card’s Manufacturer provides the MAC Address.	Internet Service Provider provides IP Address.
5.	MAC Address is used to ensure the physical address of computer.	IP Address is the logical address of the computer.
6.	MAC Address operates in the data link layer.	IP Address operates in the network layer.
7.	MAC Address helps in simply identifying the device.	IP Address identifies the connection of the device on the network.
8.	MAC Address of computer cannot be changed with time and environment.	IP Address modifies with the time and environment.
9.	MAC Address can’t be found easily by third party.	IP Address can be found by third party.

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What Is An Mac Address

Improved By : ShivamChauhan5, ashushrma378, pp_pankaj

What Is Mac Address Mean

In order to communicate or transfer the data from one computer to another computer we need some address. In Computer Network various types of address are introduced; each works at different layer. Media Access Control Address is a physical address which works at Data Link Layer. In this article, we will discuss about addressing in DLL, which is MAC Address.

Media Access Control (MAC) Address –

MAC Addresses are unique 48-bits hardware number of a computer, which is embedded into network card (known as Network Interface Card) during the time of manufacturing. MAC Address is also known as Physical Address of a network device. In IEEE 802 standard, Data Link Layer is divided into two sublayers –

Logical Link Control(LLC) Sublayer
Media Access Control(MAC) Sublayer