2010/4/4 Scott Howard <sc...@doc.net.au> > On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matt...@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. >
Wasteful in many ways. While most of end user devices work with temporarily assigned IP addresses, or even with RFC1918 behind a NAT, very humble ethernet devices come from factory with a PERMANENTE unique mac address. And one of those devices are thrown away – let’s say a cell phone with wifi, or a cheap NIC PC card - the mac address is lost forever. Doesn’t this sound not reasonable? A.b. --
