On 2023-04-18 15:30, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
Yes, but having such a huge subnet address space surely is wasteful, and means carrying around all those extra bits in packets that will never be used.
One other thing is we don't have to worry about subnet size. All LANs are /64. A /64 has as many addresses as the entire IPv4 address space squared! As for extra bits, that's not as much of an issue as you seem to think. With modern networks running a gigabit or more, it doesn't amount to much time. Network equipment also handles things an entire frame at a time, so overall packet length doesn't even affect processing time. Also, with jumbo frames, now used in many networks, the address is a smaller portion of the overall packet. 9KB is a common size for jumbo frames. I don't know if you remember Novell Netware & IPX. An IPX address was 64 bits, 48 bits for the host and 16 for the network and that was back in the 80s, when networks and computers were a lot slower.