Speed Subnetting, Part 3

For Part 2 of this series - click here.

WARNING: You must master subnetting using our course or some other trusted materials before you start using these shortcut approaches. It is a common issue for Cisco candidates to move directly to subnetting shortcuts for the exams without fully understanding exactly how subnetting functions.

ICND1 (CCENT)

Question 3: Your co-worker has decided upon use of the 172.16.0.0 address space for a section of your network. This section requires 15 subnets. What subnet mask will you recommend?

Step 1: I reference the Powers of Two chart I created on my scratch paper when I encountered the first question. The forumla for the number of subnets you can create based on subnet bits is 2^s. From the chart I see if we "borrow" 4 bits we can create 16 subnets.

2^7=128  |  2^6=64  |  2^5=32  |  2^4=16  |  2^3=8  |  2^2-=4 | 2  ^1=2  |  2^0=1

Step 2: Borrowing 4 bits beyond the Class B boundary results in 255.255.128+64+32+16 = 240. Our mask is 255.255.240.0.