Difference Between LAN and WAN

LAN

Up to now we've been talking about Ethernet and I've made reference to the fact that Ethernet is a LAN.

A LAN is a Local Area Network. Local is generally referred to a network contained within a building or an office or a campus.

Examples:

1. You might have a LAN for example on a University campus or between office blocks in an office park.

2. A big corporate perhaps like Anglo American, would generally have a LAN that might span several buildings.

To set up a LAN -relatively speaking- is cheap. If you want to put an extra couple of network points or an extra couple of devices on the network, it 's not very expensive to do that.

WAN

Using a similar example, a Wide Area Network is a network that connects campuses.

What I'm going to do is write down some short descriptions of what a WAN is:

1. A WAN is generally slow. If we compare that to a LAN, we said that Ethernet could run up to 1000 Mbs, currently, certainly in South Africa, the fastest WAN is 155 Mbs, so you can see in a LAN we can talk up to 1000 Mbs whereas in a WAN, at the moment, currently, today in South Africa, we can only take, literally a 10th of the speed.

2. WAN's are expensive. If we look at the path of telecommunications, we need to connect two offices, one in Pretoria and one in Johannesburg together - it 's an expensive operation even for a slow line.

One of the differences between a WAN (Wide Area Network) and a LAN (Local Area Network) is the set-up cost. WAN generally are to connect remote offices and when we talk about remote offices we generally refer to the remote offices as those that are outside the campus. For example, if we have an office in Pretoria and we have an office in Cape Town, these are remote offices. There is no chance that we can connect the LAN between Cape Town and Pretoria. In a LAN we connect local offices whereas in a WAN we can connect remote offices.

Example establishment of LAN and WAN

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