Coca-Cola Reserves a Massive Range of MAC Addresses

An anonymous reader writes "GNU MacChanger's developer has found by chance that The Coca-Cola company got a range of MAC addresses allocated at the OUI, the IEEE Registration Authority in charge of managing the MAC addresses spectrum. What would Coca-Cola want around 16 million MAC addresses reserved? What are they planning to use them for? Could this part of a strategy around the Internet-of-things concept?"

Not particularly massive...

[nadamucho]

They were allocated a single 3-byte OUI, or prefix. When you realize that 16 million OUIs were originally available, it's like making a big deal that a company was granted a /24 IP range.

Re:Does Coca Cola own their own vending machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 16 million number is because that's what you get when you want MAC addresses from IEEE. The other option is something like 4096 addresses and that's just dumb.

Freestyle fountain machines

[necro81]

Coke is rolling out their Freestyle [coca-colafreestyle.com] fountain dispensing machines worldwide. Each one has the ability to phone home about inventory levels, maintenance logs, and what drinks are trending where. Coke doesn't do anything small - everything they do is done on a global scale. There are 100,000 - 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States alone. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that could scale up to 16 million machines worldwide over the product life cycle.

Re:Does Coca Cola own their own vending machines?

[Andy Dodd]

Don't forget that a MAC address is 48 bits. The vendor ID portion is 24 bits - leaving 24 bits (approx. 16 million addresses) as the smallest range of addresses you can obtain if you obtain a single VID.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Not particularly massive...

[Andy Dodd]

Also, to my knowledge there is no provision for subdividing within an OUI - a 24 bit address range is the smallest you can get.

Re:I'm Confused

[SydShamino]

If you buy a network interface card then you have to include a connector for that card on your motherboard, and have the necessary chips to talk whatever protocol is used on that bus. Which also means you have to buy or design a motherboard - and designing one probably makes sense when costs and form factor matter and you have sufficient economies of scale.

If you're designing a motherboard, you might as well just buy the ethernet chip and put it on yourself. The chip doesn't come with a built-in MAC address; that's provided from flash (or some other nonvolatile storage device on board). Whoever programs the flash (or pays the CM to program the flash) provides it with a MAC address, not the vendor of the ethernet chip itself.

My employer designs products with built-in ethernet and we have our own MAC address range(s).

Minimum Mac allocation

[mbone]

It's a 48 bit address space. They have lots of addresses. This is the minimum allocation IEEE hands out. Lot's of companies have a /24 of Mac addresses.

Exactly how old news is this?

[kasperd]

The oldest version of oui.txt I could find is dated 2010 [archive.org]. And the allocation was made before that. Which means it has been more than three years since this was news. Anybody know how to look up more precisely, when it was allocated?

Re:Not cans

[CTU]

But I can't keep dollar coins in my wallet and hate loose coins in my pocket

Re:Not cans

[Rob Bos]

Never been to a strip club, but I did a quick google search and found a couple of threads on the subject.

Two answers stood out - 1, some clubs issue coupons that you can use in place of money; the strippers just redeem them at the end of the shift. 2, use $5s, you goddamn cheapskate. :)

Re:Exactly how old news is this?

[kasperd]

Anybody know how to look up more precisely, when it was allocated?

Turns out the URL has changed over time. Knowing what the URL used to be allows looking up earlier versions.

• http://standards.ieee.org/db/oui/oui.txt
• http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
• http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt

The allocation was made between 2010 Aug 08 [archive.org] and 2010 Nov 24 [archive.org].