The Techno-Babble Dictionary: Networking

December 27th, 2013
The Techno-Babble Dictionary: Networking

By Naomi Dolin-Aubertin

Hey folks, we're back this week with a new entry in the techno-babble dictionary. This week we'll be looking at a bunch of terms for your network.

LAN or Local Area Network is a network established in a geographically small location, such as a home or office. It "is pronounced like "land" without the "d". (Computer people will think you're weird if you pronounce it "L-A-N")." It facilitates file sharing amongst computers and is most often run Ethernet-based. However, wireless options are becoming more popular leading to...

WLAN: You guessed it. This stands for Wireless Local Area Network. WLAN "provides wireless network communication over short distances using radio or infrared signals instead of traditional network cabling." They are also used to links devices within a short range and are a popular choice with homeowners. According to Wikopedia, "WLANs were once called LAWNs (for local area wireless network) by the Department of Defense." We can see how that got confusing. A WLAN is most commonly what most homeowners use. We call it Wi-Fi. 

WAN: Wide Area Network.As its name implies, a WAN covers a much broader area than a LAN. A WAN uses radio waves, satellites or phone lines to create a much larger network over metropolitan or regional bounds. Again, a WAN gives businesses and governments the ability to share data effectively regardless of location. "The Internet can be considered a WAN as well, and is used by businesses, governments, organizations, and individuals for almost any purpose imaginable."

VLAN stands for Virtual Local Area Network. A VLAN is a way of splitting a physical network into separate, smaller networks by way of switches or routers. 

The basic reason for splitting a network into VLANs is to reduce congestion on a large LAN...In a flat LAN, every packet that any device puts onto the wire gets sent to every other device on the LAN. As the number of workstations on the typical LAN grew, they started to become hopelessly congested; there were just too many collisions, because most of the time when a workstation tried to send a packet, it would find that the wire was already occupied by a packet sent by some other device.

A VLAN separates these networks into distinct pockets or layers, ensuring that information sent out from a workstation only goes to the workstations it needs to reach. A switch, as you can imagine is a very quick way of transferring the data, while traditional routers tend to bottleneck because they close of the VLANS like dams that open to allow information to pass.

LAN Party: Ok, admittedly you might not have heard this one. "LAN party is a temporary gathering of people with computers or compatible game consoles, between which they establish a local area network (LAN), primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer video games." It's like a computer flash mob. A video game playing flash mob. 


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