Media Access Control (MAC) Format

Summary

Media Access Control (MAC) formats are used as a way of creating formatting addresses with bytes of characters to forward packets to. The address is typically 6 groups of 2 hexadecimal digits with a colon or hyphen separators.

Burned-in Address

The IEEE gives each card manufacturer a range of numbers, and the manufacturer hard codes every interface produced with a unique number from their range. The first six hex digits (3 bytes or octets) called Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI), identify the manufacturuer of the adapter. The last six digits are the serial number.