Differences between LANs and WANs

Scope of a LAN is smaller

LAN interconnects devices within a single building or cluster of buildings

LAN usually owned by organization that owns the attached devices

For WANs, most of network assets are not owned by same organization

Internal data rate of LAN is much greater

Limitations and Difficulties of Wireless Technologies

Wireless is convenient and less expensive

Limitations and political and technical difficulties inhibit wireless technologies

Lack of an industry-wide standard

Device limitations

E.g., small LCD on a mobile telephone can only

displaying a few lines of text

E.g., browsers of most mobile wireless devices use

wireless markup language (WML) instead of HTML

Background

Provides preview and context for rest of

book

Covers basic topics

Data Communications

TCP/IP