How big does a WAN have to be to be considered a WAN?

Sharza-

:rolleyes:

this is the buisness world involving itself in the technology world I think, but anyway..

Im doing a gimpy project on Wide Area Networking.

So i figured Id try get some meaninful interesting stuff into it instead of the usual rewritten plagerised bs that makes up 99% of project material.


So my question, how big does a Wide Area Network have to be, to be considered a Wide Area Network.

Wiki and most other sources give some variation of "large geographical area". Its all about perspective though.

Any hard numbers? I hope not, will make my project one hundred times more interesting.

seamus

Well with the (relatively) recent addition of the word MAN (metropolitan area network), the definition of a WAN is somewhat refined. When you get up to networks the scale of MANs and WANs though, it's tough to define.

I would consider a WAN to be any network that involves two or more large networks interconnected, assuming that the networks are in different cities, counties, provinces or countries. For example, in work we have a network, with a large MAN covering two offices within two miles of eachother in the Dublin city centre. We also have three regional offices with smallish LANs interconnected with the main office. I wouldn't consider this a WAN. However, we are also interconnected with the network of each firm in every other country in the world that has an office there. That's a WAN.

My 2c.

stevenmu

I think I would consider it a WAN when two or more connected networks are not in the same town/city and are far enough apart that they have to rely on existing national/international communications infrastructure (i.e. the phone system). Like Seamus I worked in a place with 2 Dublin city centre offices (which was a MAN) but also connected to an office in Munster somewhere (can't remember now) but I consider this a WAN, even though they only had a few machines there. We were also connected to offices around Europe and the US and we called this the GWAN (Global WAN).

To add to the confusion a bit, I'm not sure what I'd consider a home user who's PC dials in, or a user travelling with a laptop connecting. Going on my definition above (which I obviously just made up and you shouldn't put any faith in) they would theoretically be WAN users, but from a practical stand point (routing, authentication etc) they would behave almost as if they were connected via a lan.

CyberGhost

interesting, thanks for the read.