what about 48 bits?

Mon Apr 5 01:27:46 UTC 2010

On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 14:05:50 -0700
Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:

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

Has anybody considered lobbying the IEEE to do a point to point version
of Ethernet to gets rid of addressing fields? Assuming an average 1024
byte packet size, on a 10Gbps link they're wasting 100+ Mbps. 100GE /
1TE starts to make it even more worth doing.

Actually the minimum 64 byte packet size could probably go too, as that
was only there for collision detection.

>   Scott.