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Local Area Networks and Wide Area Networks- LAN & WAN

difference bitween LAN & WAN
Despite the growth of the Internet, the characteristics of local area networks ("LANs" - computer networks that do not extend beyond a few kilometers in size) remain distinct. This is because networks on this scale do not require all the features associated with larger networks and are often more cost-effective and efficient without them. When they are not connected with the Internet, they also have the advantages of privacy and security. However, purposefully lacking a direct connection to the Internet will not provide 100% protection of the LAN from hackers, military forces, or economic powers. These threats exist if there are any methods for connecting remotely to the LAN.
There are also independent wide area networks ("WANs" - private computer networks that can and do extend for thousands of kilometers.) Once again, some of their advantages include their privacy, security, and complete ignoring of any potential hackers - who cannot "touch" them. Of course, prime users of private LANs and WANs include armed forces and intelligence agencies that must keep their information completely secure and secret.
In the mid-1980s, several sets of communication protocols emerged to fill the gaps between the data-link layer and the application layer of the OSI reference model. These included Appletalk, IPX, and NetBIOS with the dominant protocol set during the early 1990s being IPX due to its popularity with MS-DOS users. TCP/IP existed at this point, but it was typically only used by large government and research facilities.[73]
As the Internet grew in popularity and a larger percentage of traffic became Internet-related, LANs and WANs gradually moved towards the TCP/IP protocols, and today networks mostly dedicated to TCP/IP traffic are common. The move to TCP/IP was helped by technologies such as DHCP that allowed TCP/IP clients to discover their own network address — a function that came standard with the AppleTalk/ IPX/ NetBIOS protocol sets.[74]
It is at the data-link layer, though, that most modern LANs diverge from the Internet. Whereas Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) are typical data-link protocols for larger networks such as WANs; Ethernet and Token Ring are typical data-link protocols for LANs. These protocols differ from the former protocols in that they are simpler (e.g. they omit features such as Quality of Service guarantees) and offer collision prevention. Both of these differences allow for more economical systems.[75] Despite the modest popularity of IBM token ring in the 1980s and 90's, virtually all LANs now use either wired or wireless Ethernets. At the physical layer, most wired Ethernet implementations use copper twisted-pair cables (including the common 10BASE-T networks). However, some early implementations used heavier coaxial cables and some recent implementations (especially high-speed ones) use optical fibers.[76] When optic fibers are used, the distinction must be made between multimode fibers and single-mode fiberes. Multimode fibers can be thought of as thicker optical fibers that are cheaper to manufacture devices for but that suffers from less usable bandwidth and worse attenuation - implying poorer long-distance performance.
Nintendo Wii USB Enabled Lan AdapterNintendo Wii USB Enabled Lan Adapter

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