Support of CIDR addressing

[#1]

We are looking at getting service from COX. They will give us 16 static IPs (13 usable). However, they have indicated that the router must support CIDR blocks. I understand CIDR addressing (e.g., 66.166.139.65/28) but I do not know what it means for a router to support CIDR. Anybody can shed any light on this? Will the Fortigate devices support this? Thanks in advance. /Osman

[g3rman]

Hi, welcome to the forums. CIDR is essentially just another way to describe subnetting. Your Fortinet supports this no problem. Back in the days routing protocols such as RIP did not support CIDR and could only route along subnet boundaries. For example in RIPv1 10.230.5.1/255.255.255.0 was part of a class A subnet (10.x.x.x) and therefore RIP would only advertise the entire class A network. Here is more info at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing