If you’ve never seen one before, an example of a MAC address is 00:0E:78:C2:7G. If you look at the MAC address for any of your devices, you’ll see that it’s comprised of six two-digit hexadecimal values separated by colons. The MAC addresses for all devices on the network come from the network cards that manufacturers put in their devices.įor that reason, you can’t change the hardware address, MAC address or any other similar identifier on your device.Īt this point you may be wondering, if billions of devices are connected to the internet, how do they all have unique MAC addresses? How are manufacturers able to assign unique addresses to identify devices on networks? The answer that there are over 281 trillion possible MAC addresses because of their format as a 48-bit number and letter identifier. Any device that functions as a part of any given network has to have either an ethernet card for a wired network or a Wi-Fi card for a wireless connection.
