That is because you can only add a device to the QoS rules or priority networks of your router using its MAC address. If you have numerous devices that you have blacklisted from your home or office internet, whitelisting a device would be difficult if you don’t know its MAC address.Īdditionally, if you have a router that lets you prioritize internet traffic by devices through Quality of Service (QoS) settings, knowing the MAC address of your devices is also important. These are typical formats for MAC addresses.Īnother use-case of the MAC address is for unblocking a device from your Wi-Fi network. So instead of seeing iPhone X or OnePlus 7 on your router dashboard, you will most likely see something like this: 23-78-98-A8-8P-6C or 75:8A:8B:48:12:54. Instead, they would be identified by a weird-looking combination of 12 alphanumeric characters grouped in twos by a colon or a hyphen. Blocking either of them might be difficult because both devices would not appear as iPhone X and OnePlus 7 on your router admin panel. Say you have two friends over at your place, and their smartphones (iPhone X and OnePlus 7) are connected to your home internet. While you can use device names to identify devices connected to your network, the MAC address is a more accurate identifier. Primarily, MAC addresses are used to identify devices connected to your home or office network.

In this article, we will walk you through some uses of MAC addresses for wireless network connectivity and how you can find the MAC addresses of your devices - mobile and PC.

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