What is WAN?

The WAN or Wide Area Network is a kind of network spanning a large geographical area, the most common example is the internet. This is being contrasted to smaller LAN and MANs. The LANs are home or office networks, while he MAN could encompass a campus or even residents of the city, like in the citywide WI-Fi network.

Moreover, the internet is a public kind of WAN, yet there are some other ways of creating a good business model or private version. The private network is somewhat two or more LANs that are connected to each other. For instance, the company with offices in New York and Los Angeles might have their own setup of LAN at every office. Throughout the leased of telephone lines, all of the LANs could surely communicate with each other and that forms WAN.

Moreover, the routers are being used to directing the communications in between the LANs that are communicating on the WAN. The router that is installed upon the leased lines will then read he headers or enveloped on every data packet passing throughout the WAN, sending it to the appropriate LAN. Whenever the packet arrives at LAN, the “switch” would send the data packet to the right machine.