Class A addresses
Class A addresses are designed for very large networks. In a Class A address, the first octet of the address is the network ID, and the remaining three octets are the host ID. Because only eight bits are allocated to the network ID and the first of these bits is used to indicate that the address is a Class A address, only 126 Class A networks can exist in the entire Internet. However, each Class A network can accommodate more than 16 million hosts.
Only about 40 Class A addresses are actually assigned to companies or organizations. The rest are either reserved for use by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) or are assigned to organizations that manage IP assignments for geographic regions such as Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Just for fun, Table-4 lists some of the better-known Class A networks. You'll probably recognize many of them. In case you're interested, you can find a complete list of all the Class A address assignments at
www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
You may have noticed in Table-3 that Class A addresses end with 126.x.y.z, and Class B addresses begin with 128.x.y.z. What happened to 127.x.y.z? This special range of addresses is reserved for loopback testing, so these addresses aren't assigned to public networks.
Table-4 Some Well-Known Class A Networks| Net | Description | Net | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | General Electric Company | 32 | Norsk Informasjonsteknology |
| 4 | Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. | 33 | DLA Systems Automation Center |
| 6 | Army Information Systems Center | 35 | MERIT Computer Network |
| 8 | Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. | 38 | Performance Systems International |
| 9 | IBM | 40 | Eli Lilly and Company |
| 11 | DoD Intel Information Systems | 43 | Japan Inet |
| 12 | AT&T Bell Laboratories | 44 | Amateur Radio Digital Communications |
| 13 | Xerox Corporation | 45 | Interop Show Network |
| 15 | Hewlett-Packard Company | 46 | Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. |
| 16 | Digital Equipment Corporation | 47 | Bell-Northern Research |
| 17 | Apple Computer Inc | 48 | Prudential Securities Inc. |
| 18 | MIT | 51 | Department of Social Security of UK |
| 19 | Ford Motor Company | 52 | E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. |
| 20 | Computer Sciences Corporation | 53 | Cap Debis CCS (Germany) |
| 22 | Defense Information Systems Agency | 54 | Merck and Co., Inc. |
| 25 | Royal Signals and Radar Establishment | 55 | Boeing Computer Services |
| 26 | Defense Information Systems Agency | 56 | U.S. Postal Service |
| 28 | Decision Sciences Institute (North) | 57 | SITA |
| 19-30 | Defense Information Systems Agency |
Class B addresses
In a Class B address, the first two octets of the IP address are used as the network ID, and the second two octets are used as the host ID. Thus, a Class B address comes close to my hypothetical scheme of splitting the address down the middle, using half for the network ID and half for the host ID. It isn't identical to this scheme, however, because the first two bits of the first octet are required to be 10, in order to indicate that the address is a Class B address. As a result, a total of 16,384 Class B networks can exist. All Class B addresses fall within the range 128.x.y.z to 191.x.y.z. Each Class B address can accommodate more than 65,000 hosts.
The problem with Class B networks is that even though they are much smaller than Class A networks, they still allocate far too many host IDs. Very few networks have tens of thousands of hosts. Thus, careless assignment of Class B addresses can lead to a large percentage of the available host addresses being wasted on organizations that don't need them.
Class C addresses
In a Class C address, the first three octets are used for the network ID, and the fourth octet is used for the host ID. With only eight bits for the host ID, each Class C network can accommodate only 254 hosts. However, with 24 network ID bits, Class C addresses allow for more than 2 million networks.
The problem with Class C networks is that they're too small. Although few organizations need the tens of thousands of host addresses provided by a Class B address, many organizations need more than a few hundred. The large discrepancy between Class B networks and Class C networks is what led to the development of subnetting, which I describe in the next section.