It knew nothing at all about any other layers in place – so your web browser doesn't need to care whether it is running on a machine that uses a token ring, ethernet or wifi network – and definitely doesn't need to know what hardware the remote machine uses. ![]() Instead of this, the problem of networking was split into layers, and each layer knew how to speak to the matching layer on a remote machine, and how to communicate with the layer beneath (and sometimes above) it on its local machine. All communication was effectively point-to-point, and software had to be written to suit the exact situation in which it was to be deployed. ![]() In the olden days, each application would know exactly which machine code instructions needed to be run in order to produce an appropriate signal that would reach, and could be decoded by, the application at the far end. To really understand the answer to this question, you need to understand the OSI (sometimes known as the 7-layer) model.įor communication to take place between 2 applications running on separate machines which don't have a direct physical connection, a lot of work needs to take place. They serve no function on the wider internet. This can be important when thousands of devices are connected together within a single organisation. They allow a network device to attract the attention of a single directly connected device, even though the physical connection is shared. MAC addresses are required to make a local Ethernet (or wifi) network function. If we ever found a better standard than IP (for example IPv6 if all the IPv4 addresses ran out), most Ethernet hardware could carry the new kind of traffic without modification – and a simple software/firmware update would fix most of the rest. If we ever found a better standard than Ethernet, it might not use MAC addresses but IP traffic from the internet could still flow across it, even if other people on the internet had never heard of it. They allow a device to communicate with a machine on the local physical network (LAN), and cannot be routed across the Internet - because physical hardware might in theory be plugged in anywhere in the world.īy contrast, IP addresses cover the whole internet, and routers use them to figure out where to send data even if it needs multiple hops to reach its destination – but they aren't helpful in interfacing with the physical hardware on your local network. TL DR> MAC addresses are a low level component of an Ethernet network (and some other similar standards, such as WiFi).
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