In recent months we have witnessed an incredible growth in the quantity of networked devices in the home. After several requests for network subnets larger than the traditional 254 host limit we decided to embrace the classless /23 (CIDR Notation) subnets in our residential network design. This is yet another first in many innovations that Access Networks has introduced into the residential space (apologies for the shameless plug – I just had to…).

So what changed? With a /23 subnet your subnet mask is 255.255.254.0 which means that you now have the ability to have more hosts (clients) on one subnet. How many clients? 510.

So how does this work? Your subnet mask controls the size of your network. Changing our subnet mask from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.254.0 essentially doubles the capacity of your network. Now: If our old network was 192.168.18.xxx and we changed our subnet mask from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.254.0 we now added the 192.168.19.xxx into our IP range:



The above snapshot was taken from subnetcalculator.com – a useful tool in today’s complex world. The beauty of this not only that we now have more hosts, but also that they auto discover each other. This is very useful for applications using Bonjour or mDNS.

My personal network design philosophy is based on balance. As integrators, we must balance the tool set we have in order to create a seamless environment for our client, the end-user. This new subnet design accomplishes just that. Only one question remains: Will your network hardware have the processing power to support this larger network? We know ours will.