For binary, you’d have 2 * 2 = 4 possibilities. What if you had to write 2 digits? For decimal, you’d have 10 * 10 possibilities (This essentially means that you can write any number from 00 to 99). If you had to write a hexadecimal digit, you’d have 16 possibilities. If you had to write a decimal digit, you’d have 10 possibilities. If you could write one binary digit, how many possibilities would you have? Well, 2. Now imagine that you can write 1 digit on a piece of paper. That’s why you’ll never see any other symbols being used in a mac address, apart from colons or dashes which are used as separators.

Usually we use the first six symbols of the English alphabet, namely - a, b, c, d, e, and f. We already have 10 digits - 0 to 9, we need six more symbols. Its written in the number system which uses 16 digits, called the hexadecimal number system. The mac address that appears to be a string of length 12 is actually a number. In fact, the same is true for number systems using any number of digits, be it 2 (binary), 10 (decimal, the regular representation we use), or some other integer greater than 2.

using 10 symbols - 0, 1, 2, …, 8, 9 can be represented in binary as well. All of the numbers that can be represented in the “regular” way, i.e. You already may know about binary, a number system where we only use two symbols - 0, and 1. This is because the MAC address representation you see is called hexadecimal. You might have noticed that your MAC address does not have any other alphabets than a, b, c, d, e and f. Why is the MAC address called 48 bit when it is 12 characters in length?

Convert mac address from hex to binary