Talk:Wide area network/Archive 1

August 2006
The ARPANET certainly covered a wide geographical area - I'm not sure it classifies as a LAN. I suppose the argument in favor of it being considered LAN is that it was not built out of smaller subnetworks (e.g. LANs) and was technologically more similar to today's LANs than to today's WANs. Comments? Also the statement that the ARPANET was "invented by the US military" is probably a little misleading. Speedarius 01:36, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

what is wide area netwok?


 * If you couldn't understand the article a WAN simply is a network on a large area, such as across a city or between countries.GeneralBenKenobi 05:01, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

External link
I believe that allowing readers to check there internet WAN IP address is useful. Having an external link to a page without ads is a benefit to the user. Is there a wiki tag that displays the reader's WAN IP address? Find your Internet WAN IP Address

Funvill 19:19, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization
Is it Wide Area Network or wide area network? The URL of the article and the spelling of similar named networks in the article suggest lower case, however it is written in upper case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.33.73.38 (talk) 17:10, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Problem with the frontier line between LAN, MAN and WAN
The usual boundary between LANs, MANs and WANs is about distance. For example, LANs are supposed to cover "a small physical area" (Wikipedia) and the IEEE says that a MAN is a MAN "up to 50 km"--apparently, it becomes a WAN if it covers 50.1 km.

I have a problem about that. For example, you can have a leased line between two buildings across a road (this can be a 20 foot network), but you can also have a leased line across continents. Depending on the country and other factors, the technology and the provider can be the same in both cases.

Another example: your LAN is certainly an Ethernet network. If it is in one building, it is a LAN, everybody agrees about that. If it covers two adjacent buildings on one piece of land, is it still a LAN, or is it a MAN? If the answer is, 'a LAN', what about three buildings? Or ten? Fibre networks can go from a building to another, or be in a single building, it's the same technology, Ethernet 100Base-SX, 100Base-FX, 1000Base-LX, whatever. What is the difference?

A last example: your company is on six sites in a big city. It is a MAN. You add a seventh site which is 60 km away. Does it make your MAN a WAN? Why would it if the network technology and the telco company is the same?

I think that the only way to draw a boundary between LANs, MANs and WANs is about network architecture, not feet or miles. TWO LAN can be WAN or not

A LAN is on one piece of land--big or small. If you have a LAN, you do what you want to link your computers together.

A WAN is a link between two or more sites which are separated by a public space. If you have a site on a street and another on the other street, you can't walk with your cable and nail it down on other people's houses to connect your LANs. You need to use the underground fibre cables of a telco company. You have a WAN.

As concerns MANs, I am not sure they do exist. It is a very country specific notion. A MAN in Korea or Venezuela is very different from a MAN in Italy.

Pierre Jaquet (talk) 18:28, 27 September 2009 (UTC) no idea —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.19.207 (talk) 19:20, 31 March 2010 (UTC)