IP addresses help to identify the pieces of hardware connected to your network. To locate a particular device, you would need to organize the IP addresses in a logical way. This is where subnetting excels as a tool to help you maintain efficiency across your network.

There could be hundreds of thousands of devices that are connected within a network, and the corresponding IP addresses can create a complex route that traffic must travel. Subnetting limits the IP address usage to within a few devices. This allows an engineer to use subnetting to create sub-networks, sorting data so that it can travel without touching every part of the more complex routers. To do this, an engineer needs to match each IP address class to a subnet mask.

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