There are a few different ways to approach subnetting, and it can get confusing because of the

complexity of some subnets and the flexibility they offer. For this reason I created this little
paragraph to let you know how we are going to approach and learn subnetting.

We are going to analyze the common subnet masks for each class, giving detailed examples for
most of them and allowing you to "see" how everything is calculated and understand the
different effects a subnet mask can have as you change it. Once you have mastered this, you can
then go on and create your custom subnet masks using any type of class.

Default subnet masks of each class

By now you should have some idea what the subnet mask does and how it's used to partition a
network. What you need to keep in mind is that each class has its DEFAULT subnet mask,
which we can change to suit our needs. I have already mentioned this in the previous page, but
we need to look into it in a bit more detail.

The picture below shows our three network classes with their respective default subnet masks:

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