Why is both MAC as well as IP address needed? This question might have been strike through your mind. Isn’t having an IP address is sufficient? Why does your computer needs both the address to connect to a network? What is the difference between an IP address and MAC address?
In this post, you’d get answers for these questions as, we are going to discuss both the addresses and show you the difference between both and why you need them.
IP address:
If all the computers require a physical medium to connect with each other than, the entire network will become very complicated. Just imagine for few seconds, you need a physical wire to connect to a company website in US or you may need a physical wire to connect to msn.com. What if everyone in the world needs a physical medium to connect to a website. Would this make any sense? .
To resolve this issue and avoid physical limitation, the computer has been provided with an IP address. IP address is a string of numbers separated with full stops which identifies each computer communication over a network.
MAC address:
A MAC address is physical address of a device. It’s a long number of 6 bytes which represents a device address for the purpose of communicating to other devices over a network.
The device could be anything such as a printer, television, Xerox or any other device which’s needed to communicate to other devices.The MAC address doesn’t let you know where exactly the node is over network. The only information you could get from them is the vendor and node identifier.
Why a system needs both IP and MAC address?
So now you might have understood that MAC addresses handle the physical connection between computers whereas, an IP address handle the logical connection between computer to computer and network to network.
Both IP address and MAC address are unique identifiers of networked devices, but these networked devices need an IP address to communicate with other networked devices.
If you are facing any problem regrading your system IP and MAC address. Feel free to contact our Network troubleshooting solution providers that can come to rescue in such situation.
In this article the difference that is mentioned is really true. Mac addresses handle the physical connection between your system and IP address handle logical connection between systems and networks.In simple words they both are important.
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