A system of interconnections within a communications system that allows the components to communicate directly with each other.. Dividing a network into smaller subgroups.. A router would be a good example..

Subnetting is basically breaking down a group of IP addresses in to smaller groups a way of managing IP addresses. With IPv4 we have a limited amount of IP adds that we can use so we have to manage them by subnetting. - Simple way of explaining it would be. You have a network with 100 computers but need 5 different groups. Some groups you want to allow certain access while others are blocked. - Total Network: 100 Total Subnetworks: 5 - Its defined by the network administrator what subnet you are apart of and for what reason. They would set up your computer and give it an IP address. There is no software that you run and it will configure your computers to be subnetted because it depends how many computers you have on the network. Also how many you want per group.

Subnetting is basically dividing an existing network into further smaller networks..This idea came into practice because of limited ip address..Any ip address is divided into a network-id and host-id Using subnetting what is basically done is, the host id is further divided to form a subnet mask and host id..Thus more no of hosts can be now connected and divided in to separate networks.. To obtain a subnet id the ip address is ANDed with the subnet mask revealing the subnet number Got it

here are a couple web site that might help you read up on it: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4554/ipconfig-31? a=view http://www.support.psi.com/support/common/routers/files /SUBNET-Desc.html I agree with everybody else on how it works just thought I would throw in web site to show little more in depth look

Solar Winds subnetting calculator might help you out. I don't get it though, if you don't know how to subnet, why don't you go find out on wikipedia? Or take a Cisco course in networking. Sheesh. Anyways, subnetting is done by determining how many bits in your address belong to network and how many belong to hosts. Or something like that. My God, its been forever XP....

Very much like subdividing in real estate. You take a larger piece of land and divide it into smaller pieces that are independent of each other. Subnetting is taking a larger network space and dividing it into smaller independant network spaces. To really understand this, you need to learn a bit about binary math and IP Addressing. This Wikipedia article is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnetwork

Subnetting is the use of a giant net or nets to catch a submarine in the ocean. Very inefficient.

&lt;b><u>What is Subnetting?</u><b> IP address carries two pieces of information: The first part of IP address is a network address, The second part is a HOST address. Just exactly how many bits of the address represents the Network address is determined by the class of address and the subnet mask. For example, computer reads the first 3 bits of the address and right away determines that it's a class C address. For a computer, it means that the first 3 octets (first 24 bits) is a network address, and the rest is the Host address. Sometimes it is necessary to divide a network into smaller logical groups. This is called <b>subnetting<b>. Advantages of subnetting are: Reduced network congestion Increase in network performance. <b><u>How can we Subnet a NEtwork?</u></b> To implement subnetting, we borrow some of the bits from the host address and use them for the subnet address. <u>Example:</u> Let’s suppose we have a whole class C network assigned to us 110010101101110101100100. We can have 254 addresses available for us to use on our network. If we need to divide our network into 5 subnets, we would need to borrow 3 bits from the host address portion to use them to identify subnet address. We will have only 5 bits left to use for host addresses. We can have only 32 combinations with 5 bits, minus 2 because we cannot have addresses with all 1s or all 0s. So now we can have 5 subnets with 30 hosts on each one, totalling 150 hosts. Additionally, every subnet must have one host address reserved for the router interface because we need to use routers to connect our subnets. Now, we down to 29 addresses available for our computers on our 5 subnets. 29x5=145 In order to implement subnetting, we use subnet masks to let our computers know how many bits from IP address will be used for the network address, and how many for the host address. The default subnet mask for class C address is 255.255.255.0, in binary it looks like this:11111111111111111111111100000000 In order to borrow 3 bits from the host address part, we must create a custom subnet mask like this: 11111111111111111111111111100000 or 255.255.255.224