CCNA Exam Tutorial: MAC Addressing Formats And Broadcasts
Your CCNA exam success depends on your mastery of networking, routing, and switching fundamentals. Those fundamentals have to include knowledge of MAC addresses, so let’s take a close look at Media Access Control addressing.
A typical MAC address looks something like this:
af-14-b3-c2-14-45
You may be wondering why we've got letters and numbers in this address. MAC addresses are expressed in hexadecimal, which gives us the ability to express more values with the same number of bits. Theoretically, every single NIC in the world should have a totally unique MAC address, and the only way to do this is to express MAC addresses in hexadecimal.
MAC addresses are actually made up of two parts, so let's take another look at the one I showed you earlier.
af-14-b3-c2-14-45
The first half of that address (af-14-b3) is the Organizationally Unique Identifier. This particular OUI would belong to one and only one vendor, making it "organizationally unique". The second half of the address is a combination of hex characters that this particular vendor has not used before with this particular OUI, sometimes called the Device ID.
Breaking the example down into its two parts: