Cisco Enterprise Network Core Technologies (ENCOR) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The 3-bit Priority Code Point (PCP) field defined in the IEEE 802.1P standard provides a range of priority levels that can be utilized for classifying traffic in Ethernet networks. With 3 bits available for representation, the number of possible combinations can be calculated using the formula for binary combinations, which is 2 to the power of the number of bits.

In this case, with 3 bits, the calculation is as follows:

2^3 = 8

This means there are a total of 8 different priority levels that can be specified using the PCP field. In practical application, these priority levels are often used in Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms to prioritize certain types of network traffic over others, ensuring that more critical data packets (like voice or video traffic) can traverse the network more efficiently compared to less critical data.

Thus, the correct answer indicates that the 3-bit PCP field in 802.1P allows for 8 distinct levels of CoS (Class of Service) priority, which plays a vital role in managing and directing traffic flow within a networking environment.