What are the categories of network?

CATEGORIES OF NETWORKS:

There are three primary categories are,

1.     Local area network.

2.     Metropolitan area network.

3.     Wide area network.

1. Local Area Network:

They are usually privately owned and link the devices in a single office, building and campus. Currently LAN size is limited to a few kilometers. It may be from two PC’s to throughout a company.

The most common LAN topologies are bus, ring and star. They have data rates from 4 to 16 Mbps. Today the speed is on increasing and can reach 100 mbps.

2. Metropolitan Area Network:

They are designed to extend over an entire city. It may be a single network or connecting a number of LANs into a large network. So the resources are shared between LANs. Example of MAN is, telephone companies provide a popular MAN service called switched multi megabit data service (SMDS).

3. Wide Area Network:

It provides a long distance transmission of data, voice, image and video information over a large geographical are like country, continent or even the whole world.