Local Area Network

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office, or group of buildings. Current LANs are most likely to be based on switched IEEE 802.3 Ethernet running at 10, 100 or 1,000 Mbit/s, or on Wi-Fi technology.

The defining characteristics of LANs in contrast to WANs (wide area networks) are their much smaller geographic ranges, higher throughput, and their independence of leased telecommunication lines.

Technical aspects[edit]

Although switched Ethernet is now most common at the physical and data link layers, and TCP/IP as a protocol, historically many different options have been used (see below), and some continue to be popular in niche areas. Larger LANs may have redundant links, and routers or switches capable of using spanning tree protocol and similar techniques to recover from failed links. LANs may have connections to other LANs via routers and leased lines to create a WAN (Wide Area Network). Most will also have connections to the large public network known as the Internet, and links to other LANs can be 'tunneled' across this using VPN technologies.

History[edit]

In the days before personal computers, a site might have just one central computer, with users accessing this via computer terminals over simple low-speed cabling. Networks such as IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) were aimed at linking terminals or other mainframes at remote sites over leased lines—hence these were wide area networks.

The first LANs were created in the late 1970s and used to create high-speed links between several large central computers at one site. Of many competing systems created at this time, Ethernet and ARCNET were the most popular.

The growth of CP/M and then DOS based personal computer meant that a single site began to have dozens or even hundreds of computers. The initial attraction of networking these was generally to share disk space and laser printers, which were both very expensive at the time. There was much enthusiasm for the concept and for several years from about 1983 onward computer industry pundits would regularly declare the coming year to be “the year of the LAN”.

In reality the concept was marred by proliferation of incompatible physical layer and network protocol implementations, and confusion over how best to share resources. Typically each vendor would have their own type of network card, cabling, protocol, and network operating system. A solution appeared with the advent of Novell NetWare which gave: (a) even-handed support for the 40 or so competing card/cable types, and (b) a much more sophisticated operating system than most of its competitors. NetWare dominated the personal computer LAN business from early after its introduction in 1983 until the mid 1990s when Microsoft introduced Windows NT Advanced Server and Windows for Workgroups.

Of the competitors to NetWare, only Banyan Vines had comparable technical strengths, but Banyan never gained a secure base. Microsoft and 3Com worked together to create a simple network operating system which formed the base of 3Com's 3+Share, Microsoft's LAN Manager and IBM's LAN Server. None of these were particularly successful.

In this same timeframe Unix computer workstations from vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Intergraph, NeXT and Apollo were using TCP/IP based networking. Although this market segment is now much reduced, the technologies developed in this area continue to be influential on the Internet and in both Linux and Apple Mac OS X networking, and the TCP/IP protocol has now almost completely replaced IPX, AppleTalk, NETBEUI and other protocols used by the early PC LANs.

See also[edit]

• MAN
• Intranet