There are dif­fer­ent types of Com­puter Net­work­ing that you may need for your home or office. To begin with you have the option of a wired or wire­less com­puter net­work. These types of net­works dif­fer. A wired com­puter net­work will have cop­per or fiber optic cabling run­ning between com­put­ers while a wire­less net­work uses radio waves and/​or microwaves to main­tain com­mu­ni­ca­tion channels.

A client/​server net­work works by using client devices, typ­i­cally PCs with net­work soft­ware appli­ca­tions installed that request and receive infor­ma­tion over the net­work. The server device will usu­ally store files and data­bases and includes more com­plex appli­ca­tions like Web sites. These devices often fea­ture high-​​powered cen­tral proces­sors, more mem­ory and larger disk dri­ves than the client devices. Two exam­ples of client-​​server sys­tems include Web browsers and servers.

In addi­tion to these types of net­works there are also types of area net­works. These are cat­e­go­rized by their scope or scale. Some area net­work types include:
• LAN — Local Area Net­work
• WAN — Wide Area Net­work
• WLAN — Wire­less Local Area Net­work — a LAN based on WiFi wire­less net­work tech­nol­ogy
• MAN — Met­ro­pol­i­tan Area Net­work — a net­work span­ning a phys­i­cal area larger than a LAN but smaller than a WAN, such as a city. A MAN is typ­i­cally owned an oper­ated by a sin­gle entity such as a gov­ern­ment body or large cor­po­ra­tion.
• CAN — Cam­pus Area Net­work — a net­work span­ning mul­ti­ple LANs but smaller than a MAN, such as on a uni­ver­sity or local busi­ness cam­pus.
• Stor­age Area Net­work — con­nects servers to data stor­age devices through a tech­nol­ogy like Fibre Chan­nel.
• Sys­tem Area Net­work — links high-​​performance com­put­ers with high-​​speed con­nec­tions in a clus­ter con­fig­u­ra­tion. Also known as Clus­ter Area Network.

These are just a few of the var­i­ous types of area net­works. LAN and WAN were the orig­i­nal cat­e­gories of area net­works but through the evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­ogy we have been forced to keep adding more and more types due to the ever-​​changing field.

A LAN net­work will con­nect devices over a rel­a­tively short dis­tance. This may include a build­ing, school, or home that will con­tain a sin­gle LAN. Some­times one build­ing will con­tain a few small LANs and on the other hand a LAN may span a group of nearby build­ings. A WAN spans a large dis­tance. The Inter­net is the largest WAN as it cov­ers the Earth. A net­work device called a router will con­nect LANs to a WAN. These are typ­i­cally not owned by any one orga­ni­za­tion like LANs but are under a dis­trib­uted own­er­ship and man­age­ment system.

Related posts:

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2. Net­work Con­fig­u­ra­tion Prob­lem Involv­ing Router and Fire­wall IP Addresses?
3. Trou­bleshoot­ing Wi-​​​​Fi Wire­less Net­work Prob­lems — 4 Diag­nos­tic Strate­gies Toward Opti­mal Performance
4. Hous­ton Com­puter Repairs are at an All Time High
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