A company has offices in Halifax and Toronto. Both networks are connected to allow the two
locations to communicate. This is considered what type of network?
Some other terms that you will hear often are LAN, WAN, and MAN. A local area
network (LAN) typically is confined to a single building, such as an office building,
your home network, or a college campus. A wide area network (WAN) spans multiple
geographic locations and is typically made up of multiple LANs. For example, I
have a company with an office in Halifax, Nova Scotia (that's a city in Canada next
door to the penguins) that has 100 computers all connected together. This would be
considered a LAN. Now if we expand the company and create an office in Toronto,
the network in Toronto also would be considered a LAN. If we want to allow the
two offices to share information with one another, we would connect the two LANs
together, creating a WAN.
The term metropolitan area network (MAN) is not used often anymore; it
refers to a network that exists within a single city or metropolitan area. If we had
two different buildings within a city that were connected together, it would be
considered a MAN.