A WAN is a collection of two or more
LANs network whose elements may be separated by distances great enough to require
telephone communications. The WAN supports communications between such elements. For most
WANs, the long-distance bandwidth is relatively slow, on the order of kilobits per second
kbps) as opposed to megabits per second (Mbps) for LANs. There is no specified upper limit
to the radius of a WAN, but in practice, computers distributed over areas larger than a
state almost certainly belong to different networks that are connected to each other. Such
a setup is known as Wide-Area Internetworks (WAI).
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