MAC Address Lookup

Paste the address in the box. The first three bytes — D8:3A:DD in D8:3A:DD:11:22:33 — are an Organisationally Unique Identifier, a block of addresses the manufacturer bought from the IEEE, and the IEEE publishes who holds every one of them. This looks the address up in that list and shows the registered name, along with which of the four registries it came from. That name is the MAC vendor: the company that made the network hardware, which is not always the company whose logo is on the box.

Because it is not really your phone's address. iOS and Android both invent a random address for each network you join, so that shops and networks cannot follow you between them. You can tell one at a glance once you know where to look: the second digit is 2, 6, A or E. There is nothing to look up, and a tool that answers "unknown manufacturer" for one of those is telling you its own lookup failed when in fact the address is working exactly as intended.

An Organisationally Unique Identifier: the 24-bit block at the start of a MAC address, which the IEEE sells to a manufacturer along with the sixteen million addresses inside it. There are two smaller sizes as well — 28-bit blocks of about a million addresses and 36-bit blocks of 4,096, which is what a manufacturer buys when it makes thousands of devices rather than millions. This searches all three, plus the company IDs used for local addresses.

Up to a point, and this is the honest limit of it. The address tells you the make of the network hardware, which on a home network is usually enough to recognise the thing — a Raspberry Pi, an Espressif chip in a smart plug, a Sonos speaker. It cannot tell you where the device is, and on a phone it will often be a randomised address with no maker at all. Your router's device list is what pairs the address with when it joined and how much traffic it has sent.

No, and it is worth being clear about that. It identifies a model of network hardware, not a person — the answer is "somebody has a device with an Intel wireless card in it", which describes a large fraction of the laptops on earth. It also cannot be traced to a location or an owner, and because of address randomisation it usually cannot even be matched to the same phone twice.

No. The matching happens in your browser. What the page does fetch is a slice of the IEEE registry — the part covering every address that starts with the same two digits as yours, about nine kilobytes of it — and it does the lookup against that locally. So the registry comes to you rather than your address going to us.

It is built from the IEEE's own published registry files, and the page shows the date it was read. New blocks are assigned every week, so a device released days ago can be missing; everything older is there. If a lookup comes back with no registered block and the address is not a randomised one, that is the likeliest explanation.