N-GEN Communications Web-based Seminars ©NGCS

Seminar - An Overview of Communications Technologies

Module 7 - LAN, WAN, VPN, WLAN, MAN, FDDI and Optical MANS                                                      Slide 29 of 45 _________________                                                                                  __________

                                                What is a MAN ?

                                MAN Filling a Gap Between WAN and LAN

                                Advances in Technologies

                                Customer Traffic

                                Cost Considerations

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Wide Area Networks have been a cost/performance bottleneck constraining distributed access to centralized business applications. The LANs have exploded to meet businesses' local applications demand. WAN has not kept pace. The facilities are still too expensive.  MAN is seen to remove the bottleneck between LANs and WANs. MAN is forecasted meeting the enterprise's requirements for lower cost, higher speed network access. The optical technologies are available off-the-shelf to deploy a MAN capable of transporting IP over Ethernet traffic site-to-site in a metropolitan area, thus providing a cost-effective networking solution to enterprises.

MAN is short for Metropolitan Area Network, a data network designed for a town or city. In terms of geographic breadth, MANs are larger than LANs, but smaller than WANs. MANs are usually characterized by very high-speed connections using optical fibers or other digital media.