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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
In the page you state that
"Generally, the broadcast address is found by taking the logical bit complement of the subnet mask and then logically ANDing this with the IP address."
and then give the example:
"This can be found from the subnet mask (255.255.0.0) and the IP address (eg. 172.16.48.196 - the complement of the subnet mask is 0.0.255.255, and 172.16.48.196 && 0.0.255.255 = 172.16.255.255."
For that calculation the last operation schould be OR and not AND.
Please take note.
Wouldn't it be simpler to say : "The broadcast address is an address which has all host-part bits set to 'one'" ?
Also, at least linux allows using a different broadcast address. Older linux disributions asked as part of the network setup for the broadcast address. Can someone clarify why those broadcast addresses were used/allowed ?
xerces8 --86.61.2.139 14:27, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Am I missing something here? I thought the subnet mask of the 172.16.0.0 network was 255.240.0.0. That would mean that the broadcast address would be 172.31.255.255, surely? - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 10:19, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
A number of devices still treat the .0 address as a broadcast address (including, surprisingly, the Linux kernel). There should be some mention in the article of the history of this (which I'm not totally sure of, but IIRC both .255 and .0 were broadcast until a number of years ago, when .0 was deprecated - although it's still not recommended even today). 146.87.6.75 (talk) 14:50, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
Mustn't we mention in the definition that it only works with UDP not TCP ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.240.81.106 (talk) 18:21, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
@Kvng: You've deleted my intro to the example table, but I feel very strongly this is an essential addition that really helps this page be more readable and easy to understand. The table takes some careful study, and my one sentence intro. makes that study 5x faster. Please leave it in. I've added it back with this wording: "As shown in the example below, in order to calculate the broadcast address to transmit a packet to an entire IPv4 subnet using the private IP address space 172.16.0.0/12, which has the subnet mask 255.240.0.0, the broadcast address is calculated as 172.16.0.0 bitwise ORed with 0.15.255.255 = 172.31.255.255." Also, I've moved the generic information which applies to *any* example to be a standalone paragraph, rather than part of the intro do the example. This makes much more sense. ERCaGuy (talk) 22:26, 5 April 2020 (UTC)