[124773] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: what about 48 bits?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Smith)
Sun Apr 4 21:28:26 2010
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2010 10:57:46 +0930
From: Mark Smith <nanog@85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc.nosense.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <v2kf1dedf9c1004041405o3938ad6fk9d3925623899c086@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 14:05:50 -0700
Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@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.
