Class B represents a specific range within this scheme, balancing the needs of medium-sized organizations between the extremes of massive and tiny networks. Within this range, organizations were assigned a specific network address, such as 172.
Understanding the Structure and Limitations of Class B IP Addressing
Conversely, a company slightly exceeding 65,000 hosts faced significant allocation hurdles. Advantages of the Classful Design The primary advantage of the Class B system was its hierarchical efficiency for routing.
The main drawback was the potential for waste; if an organization needed more than 65,000 addresses, they had to request a Class A address, which could waste millions of unused IPs. The division of the 16-bit host portion into a network and subnet within the organization was left to the discretion of the network administrator.
Understanding the Structure and Limitations of Class B IP Addressing
These inefficiencies contributed to the rapid exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. The solution was Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), which replaced the classful system with a more flexible method of subnetting, allowing ISPs to allocate address blocks of any size based on actual need rather than rigid classes.
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