LANs
A LAN (Local Area Network) is a privately owned network that covers anywhere from
a single building to a campus of up to several kilometres in size. It is widely used in
company offices and university campuses. One of the LAN standards is Ethernet.
It consists of a single cable (a Bus) to which all the clients are connected.
(Figure 0-2). The cable used is a shielded coaxial cable that minimises electromagnetic interference
in neighbouring cables. Ethernet offers a transmission rate of 10Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s
(1Mbit/s is a million bits per second) and it has low delay and low error rates.
| Distance between computers |
Computers in the same |
Classification |
|---|
| 10m |
Room |
LAN |
| 100m |
Building |
LAN |
| 1km |
Campus |
LAN |
| 10km |
City |
MAN |
| 100km |
Country |
WAN |
| 1,000km |
Continent |
WAN |
| 10,000km |
Planet |
Internet |
Table 1 Network classification by size
Figure 0-2 LAN
Figure 0-3 MAN