Characteristics of WANs

Covers large geographical areas

Circuits provided by a common carrier

Consists of interconnected switching nodes

Traditional WANs provide modest capacity

64000 bps common

Business subscribers using T-1 service – 1.544
Mbps common

Higher-speed WANs use optical fiber and transmission technique known as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)

10s and 100s of Mbps common

Communication Networks

Comparison of basic communication network technologies

- Circuit switching

- Packet switching

- Frame relay

- ATM