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Difference Between LAN, WAN, MAN

LANs connect devices within a small area like a home or office and have a range of up to 100 meters. MANs connect multiple LANs within a larger area like a campus or city and have a range of up to 100 km. WANs connect LANs across large distances like countries and have an unlimited range using technologies like cellular networks.

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157 views3 pages

Difference Between LAN, WAN, MAN

LANs connect devices within a small area like a home or office and have a range of up to 100 meters. MANs connect multiple LANs within a larger area like a campus or city and have a range of up to 100 km. WANs connect LANs across large distances like countries and have an unlimited range using technologies like cellular networks.

Uploaded by

Kapil Dora
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Difference between LAN,WAN,MAN

LAN stands for Local Area Network, WAN stands for Wide Area Network and MAN stands for
Metropolitan Area Network. All the technologies are mainly used for data communication.
Covers distance upto 100-1000meters. The figure-1 below depicts all the three network
topologies viz. LAN, MAN and WAN.

LAN

LAN has smaller coverage range within the house or office premises or can at least connect from
one building to the nearby building. Most of the LANs usually will have about 10 to 100 users.
Multiple users in LAN time share the system. LAN has been developed to allow sharing of
common resource such as printer,harddisk and modem to more than one PCs. In this scenario PC
connected with common resource is called as controller through which all the users will access
the resource. As the days evolve people started using LAN for e-mail system for corporate
network, here one system is configured as server storing mail boxes of all the users.

Latest advancement in the LAN technology supports data rates which range from 10 Mbps, 100
Mbps till 1Gbps. LAN is designed initially as per 802 standards, later various wireless standards
are evolved such as IEEE 802.11a, 11b, 11g and 11n. Currently research is to finalize products
supporting IEEE 802.11ac and 802.11ad supporting very high data rates.
CAN

CAN stands for Campus Area Network. It is network composed of multiple inter-connected
LAN in limited coverage area. CAN network type is smaller in comparison with MAN and
WAN as described below.

Examples of CAN based network:


• SUNet network of Stanford University
• Project Athena of MIT

It has following benefits:


• It is cost effective.
• It enables multi-department network access
• It supports single and shared data transfer

WAN

WAN has coverage larger than LAN and mainly used for cellular applications supporting both
voice and data applications. Larger network covering entire country or state is referred as WANs.
Most WANs are telephone systems. Various technologies are existing to support WAN such as
WiMAX, GSM, CDMA, HSPA, LTE, fiber optics, ATM and more. Covers distance upto 1000-
10 kilo-meters and also goes upto 100km.

MAN

MAN occupies coverage in between LANs and WANs. MAN has distance coverage and data
rate higher than LAN, but less than WAN. This is the major difference between LAN and MAN.
MAN overlaps to some extent to geographical coverage requirement of WAN. A typical example
of MAN is Local Cable TV system. Here cable TV company picks up programs from satellite
and delivers to individual homes via coaxial cable. Each home is a node in this network of nodes.

Following table compares LAN, MAN and WAN with respect to various networking parameters.

Parameters LAN MAN WAN

Metropolitan Area
Full Form Local Area Network Wide Area Network
Network

What is it? • Systems are close to each other • Large network which • Two or more LANs connected
in LAN connects different • Located over large
• contained in one office or organizations geographical area
building
• one organization can have
several LANs

Limited coverage, Unlimited (usually in 1000Km)


Distance Limited coverage, about upto 2
about upto 100 range, uses repeater and other
coverage miles(or 2500 meters)
miles(or 200 km) connectivity for range extension

Slow, about 1.5 Mbps (May vary


Speed of High, typically 10, 100 and 1000 High, typically 100
based on wireless technologies
operation Mbps Mbps
used)

Locally installed and based on


Locally installed and
Technologies Locally installed, twisted pair, common carrier e.g. twisted
based on common
used for fiber optic cable, wireless (e.g. pair wires, fiber, coaxial cable,
carrier e.g. twisted pair,
medium WLAN, Zigbee) wireless including wireless and
fiber optic cable etc.
cellular network based

Used mainly by fixed desktop


computers and portable
Can be used by any devices, but
computers (e.g. laptops) . Now-a- Used mainly by desktop
Applications desktop devices are mainly
days it is used by smart phones and mini computers.
using this network type.
due to emergence of WLAN
network

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