Ans :
| Wide area Network | Local Area Network |
| Distance up to thousands of Kilometer | Within a local site |
| Typical data rates between 9.6k to 1 Mbps | High band widtli between 1 – 16 M bps |
| Higher error rates (1 in lo5 ) | Lower error rate (1 in 1 09) |
| Often use analog circuits from the telephone systems | Use digital signaling over private cables Generally use bus or ring topology |
| Generally has point -to-point link with common topologies mesh and star | Managed by the same company which owns the computers connected to LAN |
| May be managed by organizations independent of users | LAN uses simple protocols and does not employ any retransmission strategy for lost frames |
| WAN uses complex protocols and extej~sive error recovery mechanisms | Number of host on a LAN is limited (usually up to 1024) |
| Number of node coinputers has no theoretical limit and could be very large. Tile practical limit comes from addressing schemes used to ide~itifjr individual system on the network and other resource constrains. |
