Routing and Router Basics - WANs AND ROUTERs

A wide-area network (WAN) is a data communications network spanning a large geographic area such as a state, province, or country. WANs often use transmission facilities provided by common carriers, for example, telephone companies.
These are the major characteristics of WANs:
They connect devices that are separated by wide geographical areas.
They use the services of carriers such as the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), Sprint, MCI, VPM Internet Services, Inc., and Altantes.net.
They use serial connections of various types to access bandwidth over large geographic areas.
A WAN differs from a LAN in several ways. For example, unlike a LAN, which connects workstations, peripherals, terminals, and other devices in a single building or other small geographic area, a WAN makes data connections across a broad geographic area. Companies use a WAN to connect various company sites so that information can be exchanged between distant offices.
A WAN operates at the physical layer and the data link layer of the OSI reference model. It interconnects LANs that are usually separated by large geographic areas. WANs provide for the exchange of data packets and frames between routers and switches and the LANs they support.

Từ khóa: Router Basics, wide-area network, data communications network, Networking basics, mạng cơ bản, kỹ thuật mạng, công nghệ mạng, Cisco Networking