Networking Fundamentals

Understanding subnet masks

A subnet is a smaller network within a larger network. Let me give you an analogy to reinforce this concept. Imagine you have a huge office complex (the larger network). Now, you could lease out the complex to just one company, or you could put up walls and create a number of smaller separate offices (subnets) that could be used by a number of other companies rather than just one. All of these companies will be identified by which suite number they occupy. The suite number is the equivalent of the network element of the IP address.

Even if our network is not broken down into smaller networks, we still tend to refer to that one network as a subnet.

Look at the following IP address. Which part of the address is the ...