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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos What’s a WAN?
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What’s a WAN?

A wide area network (WAN) connects multiple LANs across geographically dispersed locations, such as corporate offices, campuses, and facilities in different cities. Unlike a LAN, which handles local communication within a single site, a WAN uses routers and dedicated links to tie those sites together into one unified network infrastructure.

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About this video

A wide area network (WAN) is a network architecture designed to connect sites separated by significant geographic distances. Unlike a local area network, which facilitates communication among devices within a single physical location, a WAN bridges multiple LANs across cities, regions, or even countries. Organizations commonly deploy WANs when they operate headquarters, branch offices, satellite campuses, and remote facilities that all need to share resources and communicate with one another. The underlying structure of a WAN relies on routers placed at each location. These routers connect to the internal LANs at their respective sites and establish WAN links to routers at other sites, creating an interconnected web across the entire organization. A single location may host several distinct LANs — separated by function, such as servers, end users, and guest access — and all of those LANs feed into that site's router before traffic travels across the WAN. The result is a scalable architecture that can support dozens of LANs distributed across many locations while maintaining centralized connectivity.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Wide Area Networks (WAN)

Aligned to

Cisco CCST Networking
1.3 Differentiate between LAN, WAN, MAN, CAN, PAN, and WLAN
4.4 Explain basic routing concepts
CompTIA Network+
1.6 Compare and contrast network topologies, architectures, and types
2.1 Explain characteristics of routing technologies
CompTIA A+ Core 1
2.7 Compare and contrast Internet connection types, network types, and their features
2.2 Compare and contrast common networking hardware
Cisco CCNA
1.2 Describe characteristics of network topology architectures
1.1 Explain the role and function of network components

Key terms

Local Area Network
LAN
A network that connects devices within a limited geographic area such as a home, office floor, or building, where all devices share the same broadcast domain and communicate at high speeds with low latency. A router defines the boundary of a LAN by separating it from other networks.
Wide Area Network
WAN
A network that spans a large geographic area, connecting multiple local area networks.
Router
A network device that forwards data packets between networks based on IP addresses.
Switch
A network device that connects devices within a LAN and forwards traffic based on MAC addresses.

Transcript

What a WAN is

There are a lot of small companies that just have a local area network, or maybe a few local area networks that are all interconnected. However, some companies, once they expand past a certain point, probably have some sort of wide area network.

Just like the name suggests, a wide area network, or WAN, spans much greater distances than a LAN. A classic example of this is, let's say we have a headquarters in Seattle. We have got a satellite campus in Chicago. We have got a few offices here in New York City. And then in Texas we have a factory, and we want to interconnect all of those. So what we do is set up routers at each one of these locations, and then we are going to interconnect these locations. Now what we have created is a wide area network.

LANs inside the WAN

In contrast, our local area network is just local communication amongst those end-user devices. So what does that look like between the LAN and the WAN?

Let's say our headquarters over here has maybe a few different networks. We have one for all of our servers. We have one for our users. Maybe we have one for our guests. This satellite campus, maybe we have something similar over there. Maybe we have a LAN in our New York offices, a LAN for each one of those offices. And then we just have one maybe for the factory floor. So those are all the LANs.

So in total we have got three over here, three over here. So that is 6, 7, 8, 9 — nine it looks like — or 10 and 11. So we have got 11 local area networks in total, and these are all interconnected, but then they are connected via that router to each one. So now we have created a WAN amongst all of these networks here.

Another view

This is a different view of a different company, laid out a little differently. Right here we have a hub or a switch, so this is a LAN over here. And we have got the same thing over here, a LAN over here. Then in between we have these WAN technologies, with these WAN links between these routers, interconnecting these two LANs here.

We could have multiple LANs, as I mentioned before, hanging off of this router right here. We could have multiple LANs over here. But in this case right here, we are just saying that there is one here and there is one right here.

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