LANs, WANs, MANs, and VLANs

The next type of network is called a Wide Area Network or WAN. Follow closely: WANs can connect several LANs and they tend to span across geographical territories such as cities, states, regions, and sometimes countries. WANs can have thousands of nodes as well and is not limited in that way. WANs generally refer to the geographical area of the network.

A Metropolitan Area Network or a MAN is larger than a LAN but smaller than a WAN. This network encompasses an entire region or city. Think of a MAN as a city and all of its suburbs. Take Chicago for instance. The Chicago Metro area (apart from this term) normally includes the city of Chicago plus all first and second tier suburbs to the North, West, and South.

You will use LAN and WAN extensively throughout your networking career so it's good to recognize the and define the term straight away.

There is a new type of LAN that exists today thanks to a process called virtualization. It is called the Virtualized Local Area Network or VLAN. Virtualization is defined as creating a virtual (rather than an actual) storage device, operating system, server, or network resources. Essentially it's a method that networking professionals are using to divide up resources (such as partitioning a hard drive) to extend the availability of the resource (e.g., to make it go further than intended). It is a fairly new term and will be defined further in future articles.