Remote Access and Wide-Area Networks

                 Remote Access and Wide-Area Networks

LANs accommodate local users—people within a building
or on a campus. WANs connect users and LANs spread
between various sites, whether in the same city, across the
country, or around the world. “Remote access” refers to
a simple connection, usually dialed up over telephone lines
as needed, between an individual user or very small
branch office and a central network.
Your campus gains access to the Internet through
some type of remote connection. A single user can use a
modem to dial up an Internet service provider (ISP). Multiple
users within a campus might choose to rely on a router
to connect to the ISP, who then connects the campus to
the Internet.
In general, LAN speeds are much greater than WAN
and remote access speeds. For example, a single shared-
Ethernet connection runs at 10 Mbps (mega means “million”).
Today’s fastest analog modem runs at 56 kilobits per second
(Kbps) (kilo means “thousand”)—less than one percent of
the speed of an Ethernet link. Even the more expensive,
dedicated WAN services such as T1 lines don’t compare (with
bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps, a T1 lines has only 15 percent of
the capacity of a single Ethernet link). For this reason, proper
network design aims to keep most traffic local—that is,
contained within one site—rather than allowing that traffic

to move across the WAN.