A WAN or “Wide Area Network” is a computer network designed to connect many smaller local area networks (LANs). Your home network is your LAN and is connected to your neighbors via a WAN, often managed by your ISP. You could think of the internet as one giant WAN.
Although the Internet itself is a WAN, it is possible that there is a smaller WAN that works on the Internet, just like a company that wants to connect multiple offices. Cables would be too expensive, so they use the Internet, but we can still consider it a separate WAN. The US government uses WAN to provide communications between various branches located throughout the country; In fact, the internet began as a governmental WAN network called ARPANET.
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Differences between WAN networks and LANs
WAN and LAN are built on many of the same technologies and seem to be separated only by scale, but in practice they work on very different equipment.
Speed
Although WANs are certainly not slow, they often do not reach the same speed level as a local area network. They are built to carry the highest throughput and speed is lower than their performance.
In a LAN, because the connection distance is much shorter, you can equip all computers with 10 Gb / s network cards and transfer files and data between them at a breathtaking speed, reaching up to 100 Gbps on special network equipment such as Infiniband.
Compare this to WAN, which, even when connected to fiber optic cables, usually does not reach more than 1 Gb / s (slower than LAN speed), because WAN networks must be connected in hundreds of miles. However, unless you use many internal networks, you will mainly use a LAN to access the Internet, and Gigabit Internet is still very fast. The average internet speed in the United States is 18 Mb / s (55 times slower than gigabit).
Cables and connections
You probably know the Ethernet standard – the cable standard used to connect wired computers to the router. While Ethernet is very fast, supporting gigabit or even 10 gigabytes of bandwidth, it cannot move data very far, at a height of about 100 meters (roughly the length of a football field). These cables are called patch cords and are used to connect connections over short distances, such as a data center or home.
This is an obvious problem for WANs that need to be connected for hundreds of miles; the signal will not reach there via Ethernet. The internet was used to send copper telephone lines until it was connected to fiber optic cables. Fiber optic cables use light for data transmission and are extremely fast compared to telephone connections. They are usually connected together to increase throughput to form a fiber optic trunk cable. These are the main cables that form the backbone of the Internet.
Hardware switching
However, running the Internet on fiber optics comes at a cost, and this cost appears at the end of the line – real equipment that must support the routing of millions of different signals many times per second. The home router is fairly simple: it supports one data line and routes it to several devices in the home. Now imagine taking thousands of them, throwing them into one large warehouse-size system and connecting them to every home in the city. It easily increases the complexity of the operation.
These objects are called “Internet Exchange Points” or IXP. To power the internet, thousands of these switching and routing stations are connected worldwide, usually via a fiber optic cable. However, when they switch to IXP, they often switch to a traditional copper cable (and sometimes attached to the TV signal). When someone says they have “Internet fiber”, it means that the final cable from IXP to their home is fiber, which gives them direct access to the speed of connections between IXP. Your internet is only as fast as the weakest link in the chain, so while everyone uses fiber optic cables at some point in the process, not everyone is at full speed.
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