A group of 8 bits is often referred to as an octet.

When representing an IP address as a decimal number, we actually deal with these groups in pairs. You can see how difficult it is to read this number, so for convenience I’ll show the 32 binary numbers in groups of four bits. To a computer, this would look like this.

Remember we started off this session in Part 1 with a reminder of what an IP address and a MAC address look like.Ĭomputers can only recognise these addresses as a series of zeros and ones, but humans find long strings of zeros and ones difficult to read and interpret so this is why we represent them in this way.Īn IPv4 address is in fact a 32-bit binary number which, as you know from Part 1, provides nearly 4 million 3 hundred different addresses.īut let’s just focus on the IP address. In this video I’ll look at IP addresses, specifically IP version 4 addresses and in the next video I’ll look at MAC addresses. Now you’re familiar with the idea of representing numbers with different number bases, we’ll have a closer look at how network addresses are represented.

How to convert mac address to 48 binary