Networking: A Beginner’s Guide Fifth Edition- P20:I have run into many people over the years who have gained good even impressive working knowledge of PCs, operating systems, applications, and common problems and solutions. Many of these people are wizards with desktop computers. | Chapter 7 Making WAN Connections 77 78 Networking A Beginner s Guide Many companies have multiple locations that need to share network resources. For example maybe the company s accounting system runs at the headquarters building where the accounting and MIS staff are located but the warehouse across town still needs access to the accounting system for inventory picking tickets data entry and other order fulfillment and inventory tasks. Or perhaps the company uses a groupware system such as Lotus Notes that requires regular updates of information and messages from one site to another. In the real world the situation can become even more complex. Some companies have offices all around the globe and each office has different requirements both to access and update data in other locations. All of these are situations in which a wide area network WAN can be useful. Certainly in a pinch multiple offices can exchange data by using Federal Express and identical tape machines CD-R discs external USB hard disks or other media. Sure it s possible to simply send the data back and forth like this assuming the application supports exchanging data in this fashion but such an arrangement has some drawbacks the biggest one being that it is pretty slow. There are many ways to connect local area networks LANs in one location to LANs in another location and making such connections is the subject of this chapter. But before looking into the different WAN technologies you should assess your networking requirements. Because of the cost and the time required to implement and maintain a WAN you usually do not want to install one unless it s the only way to meet your needs. Determining WAN Needs WAN links are almost always fairly expensive to maintain. Bandwidth needs increase over time and these upgrades are costly. Also WAN links are generally much more prone to trouble than LANs because many additional possible points of failure exist. For these reasons it s important to assess the need
