What is defined in earlier IEEE 802.3 standards is often confused for what is used in practice: almost any network frame you can find on a LAN will be an Ethernet II frame, since the [[Internet protocol suite]] will use this format, with the type field set to the corresponding IETF protocol type. IEEE 802.3x-1997 allows the 16-bit field after the MAC addresses to be used as a type field or a length field, so that Ethernet II frames are also valid 802.3 frames in 802.3x-1997 and later versions of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard. | What is defined in earlier IEEE 802.3 standards is often confused for what is used in practice: almost any network frame you can find on a LAN will be an Ethernet II frame, since the [[Internet protocol suite]] will use this format, with the type field set to the corresponding IETF protocol type. IEEE 802.3x-1997 allows the 16-bit field after the MAC addresses to be used as a type field or a length field, so that Ethernet II frames are also valid 802.3 frames in 802.3x-1997 and later versions of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard. |