Metropolitan area network

A metropolitan area network (MAN) is a computer network that interconnects users with computer resources in a geographic region of the size of a metropolitan area. The term MAN is applied to the interconnection of local area networks (LANs) in a city into a single larger network which may then also offer efficient connection to a wide area network. The term is also used to describe the interconnection of several LANs in a metropolitan area through the use of point-to-point connections between them. By 1999, local area networks (LANs) were well established and providing data communication in buildings and offices. For the interconnection of LANs within a city, businesses relied primarily on the public switched telephone network. But while the telephone network was able to support the packet-based exchange of data that the various LAN protocols implemented, the bandwidth of the telephone network was already under heavy demand from circuit-switched voice, and the telephone exchanges were ill-designed to cope with the traffic spikes that LANs tended to produce. To interconnect local area networks more effectively, it was suggested that office buildings are connected using the single-mode optical fiber lines, which were by that time widely used in long-haul telephone trunks. Such dark fibre links were in some cases already installed on customer premises and telephone companies started to offer their dark fibre within their subscriber packages. Fibre optic metropolitan area networks were operated by telephone companies as private networks for their customers and did not necessarily have full integration with the public wide area network (WAN) through gateways. Besides the larger companies that connected their offices across metropolitan areas, universities and research institutions also adopted dark fibre as their metropolitan area network backbone. In West Berlin the BERCOM project built up a multifunctional broadband communications system to connect the mainframe computers that publicly funded universities and research institutions in the city housed.

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Computer network

A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies. The nodes of a computer network can include personal computers, servers, networking hardware, or other specialized or general-purpose hosts.

Data link layer

The data link layer, or layer 2, is the second layer of the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking. This layer is the protocol layer that transfers data between nodes on a network segment across the physical layer. The data link layer provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities and may also provide the means to detect and possibly correct errors that can occur in the physical layer. The data link layer is concerned with local delivery of frames between nodes on the same level of the network.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi (ˈwaɪfaɪ) is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves. These are the most widely used computer networks in the world, used globally in home and small office networks to link devices together and to a wireless router to connect them to the Internet, and in wireless access points in public places like coffee shops, hotels, libraries, and airports to provide visitors with Internet connectivity for their mobile devices.

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