A1_Brownies's questions

I work in the IT department for the residential housing area at my university (network operations is separate from ours). I've wondered how is it that when someone registers a MAC address on our device registration portal [to get wired internet access on campus], BluCat Address Manager is able to detect whether it is a wired or wireless MAC address and assign an IP address from the campus specific ranges accordingly. I know that there's some companies that require you do remote work from a computer that has to be on a wired connection, and they have a programs bundled with the software they give you that can tell the difference, but I have no clue how such a thing would be implemented. Do you have any idea how this is done? Is it right to assume that if a program can figure it out, there's something about the content of the MAC address, or other identifier of the device, that can be looked to determine this? I would like to make a shell program that can replicate this for fun. In every case, this will be for a remote computer on the same network as mine, if that simplifies things.