what about 48 bits?

Mon Apr 5 04:17:19 UTC 2010

2010/4/4 Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au>

> 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)
>
>  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. --