A MAC address is not broadcast beyond the LAN of the device it is connected to, as it is locked in the internal network. MAC is short for Media Access Control, where media refers to the local transmission media.How could I get MAC address of my website visitor?Ī host cannot determine from the MAC address of another host whether that host is on the same link (network segment) as the sending host, or it is on a network segment bridged to that network segment. This 48-bit address space potentially contains 2^248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses. The original IEEE 802 MAC address is derived from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme.It may also be referred to as an EHA (Ethernet hardware address), hardware address or physical address, unlike a programmed address, in which the host device issues commands to the NIC so as to use an arbitrary address. In that event, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer's registered identification number and could be called the burned-in address (BIA). The manufacturer of a network interface controller (NIC) assigns MAC addresses which are stored in its hardware, such as a card's read-only memory or other firmware.More sophisticated network devices such as routers and multilayer switches could even require several permanent MAC addresses. A network node may have a few network interface controllers (NICs), and each of them will have its own unique MAC address.Thus, MAC addresses will be used in one of the sublayers of the medium access control protocol. For the majority of IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi, MAC addresses function as network addresses. It’s an identifier communicating at the data link layer of a specific network segment. A device’s MAC address (Media Access Control address) is a unique sequence of numbers assigned to a network interface controller.

How to find ip address on mac