A wide area network (WAN) is a computer network designed to connect multiple smaller local area networks (LANs). Your home network is your LAN, which connects to your neighbors via WAN, usually managed by your Internet service provider. You can think of the Internet itself as a huge wide area network.
Although the Internet itself is a wide area network, there may be a small wide area network running on the Internet, just like a company that wants to connect multiple offices. Running the cable by themselves is too expensive, so they use the Internet, but we still think of it as a separate WAN.
LAN,
WAN and WLAN ports difference?
When doing router bridging, the connection and settings of the WAN port and the LAN are easily confused.
1. LAN local area network (Local Area Network) interface, generally speaking, is the network cable port between the router and the user;
2. WAN Wide Area Network (Wide Area Network), generally speaking, is the network cable port connected to the external network of the cat;
3. WLAN wireless local area network ( Wireless LAN), data is transmitted through electromagnetic waves; in
layman's terms, the WAN port is an external interface for dealing with operators and higher-level networks.
LAN and WLAN are internal interfaces, and internal computers, mobile phones, and PADs are all connected to LAN or WLAN.
The difference between
WAN and LAN WAN and LAN are built on many of the same technologies and seem to be separated proportionally, but in fact, they run on completely different hardware.
Speed
Although WANs are certainly not slow, they usually do not reach the same speed as the local network. They are built to carry as much bandwidth as possible, and speed is a secondary factor in their operation.
On a local area network, because the connection distance is much smaller, you can equip all computers with 10 Gbps network cards and transfer files and data between them at an amazing speed, even up to 100 Gbps on special network hardware such as Infiniband.
Compared with WAN, even when connected to fiber optic cable, it usually does not reach more than 1
Gbps (several orders of magnitude slower than LAN speed) because WAN requires hundreds of miles to be connected. However, unless you are doing a large number of internal networks, you will mainly use your LAN to access the Internet, and Gigabit Internet is still very fast.
Cables and connections
You may be familiar with Ethernet, the cable standard used to connect wired computers to routers. Although Ethernet is very fast, handling gigabit or even 10 gigabit throughput, it cannot carry data very far, at the top of about 100 meters (about the length of a football field). These cables are called jumpers and are used to connect short-distance connections, such as data centers or homes.
For WANs that need to be connected for hundreds of miles, this is an obvious problem; the
signal will not get there via Ethernet. The Internet used to run through copper telephone lines until it was switched mainly through fiber optic cables. Fiber optic cables use light to transmit data and are extremely fast compared to dialing. They are usually bundled together to increase bandwidth, forming optical fiber "trunk" cables. These are the main cables that make up the backbone of the Internet.
Switching hardware
However, there is a price to run the Internet on fiber, and the cost will appear at your terminal-the
actual hardware must process the routing of millions of different signals multiple times per second. Your home router is very simple: it handles a data line and routes it to the few devices in your home. Now imagine grabbing thousands of people, pushing them into a system as big as a warehouse, and connecting them to every house in the city. It is easy to increase the complexity of the operation.
These facilities are called "Internet Exchange Points" or IXPs. In order to power the Internet, thousands of these switching and routing stations are connected to all parts of the world through optical fiber trunk cables. When they arrive at the IXP, they usually switch to a traditional copper cable (sometimes bundled with the TV signal). When someone says that they have "fiber internet", they mean that the final cable from the IXP to their home is fiber optic, which allows them to directly access the connection speed between the IXP. Your internet can only be as fast as the weakest link in the chain, so although everyone uses fiber optic cables at some point in the process, not everyone gets full speed.
The above is what is a wide area network (WAN)? Introduction.
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