Foundation Topics

Introduction to Subnetting

Say you just happened to be at the sandwich shop when they were selling the world’s longest sandwich. You’re pretty hungry, so you go for it. Now you have one sandwich, but at over 2 kilometers long, you realize it’s a bit more than you need for lunch all by yourself. To make the sandwich more useful (and more portable), you chop the sandwich into meal-size pieces, and give the pieces to other folks around you, who are also ready for lunch.

Huh? Well, subnetting, at least the main concept, is similar to this sandwich story. You start with one network, but it is just one large network. As a single large entity, it may not be useful. To make it useful, you chop it into smaller pieces, called subnets, and assign those subnets to be used in different parts of the enterprise internetwork.