What is meant by IP class

[nooob]

Hi,,,

I have a very short query here. I am not much familiar with Networking. However i can explain anyone about IP and IP address. But what do you mean by IP Classes ? I have heard this term few times when i get around any people working with networking. Please help.

[Shen]

Basically IP addresses are organized into classes that determine the potential size of the network. The IPAddress class contains the address of a computer on an IP network. When the IEEE committee sat down to sort out the range of numbers that were going to be used by all computers, they came out with 5 different ranges or, as we call them, "Classes" of IP Addresses and when someone applies for IP Addresses they are given a certain range within a specific "Class" depending on the size of their network.

There are five classes of available IP ranges: Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D and Class E, while only A, B and C are commonly used. Because classes A, B and C, comprise most of the total address space (7/8ths of it). The address classes differ in size and number. To get the larger class B addresses, you might have to supply some justification, but only the class A was really tough to get.

[Big Fish]

Class A, Class B, and Class C are the three classes of addresses used on IP networks in common practice. Class A addresses are specified to networks with large number of total hosts and it allows for 126 networks by using the first octet for the network ID. Where Class B supports 65,000 hosts on each of 16,000 networks and Class C supports 254 hosts on each of 2 million networks.These three Class allow the Internet to provide addressing for a small number of very large networks, a moderate number of medium-sized organizations, and a large number of smaller companies.

[Spyrus]

Classful addressing is no longer in common usage and has now been replaced with classless addressing.Once the address's class had been determined, it was broken down into network and host bits. Of the five classes, D and E are dedicated to special purposes like D is for IP multicasting and E is reserved for “experimental use”.The four octets that make up an IP address are conventionally represented by Class A, B, C, and d respectively.