A local area network or LAN is a network limited of confined with-in a very limited area like a single building, factory, school, campus. The main purpose of LAN is to serve its users in resource sharing. Offices, home, laboratory, cyber cafe, etc are examples of LAN.
Group of computers and peripheral devices are connected in a limited area to share resources. It can also be called as the network of less than 5,000 interconnected devices across several buildings.
Characteristics features of LAN (Local area network) are:
- it is a private network. It is owned by single person or a company.
- LAN covers a certain small area upto 2 Km
- Mostly guided media are used for data transmission.
- Data transmission rate is faster than LAN compared to MAN and WAN
There are many advantages of using Local Area Networking system.
- LAN is extremely useful to share resources and devices within the network which significantly reduces the cost of hardware purchase.
- It is possible to us use same software over the network instead of buying licensed software for each client in the network.
- Data of all network users can be stored on a single hard disk of the server computer.
- Transfer of data, messages and even larger files becomes easier with LAN
- Local Area Network offers the facility to share a single internet connection among all the LAN users.
On the other hand there are drawbacks of using LAN
- LAN will indeed save cost because of shared computer resources, but the initial cost of installing Local Area Networks is quite high.
- The LAN admin can check personal data files of every LAN user, so it does not offer good privacy.
- Unauthorized users can access critical data of an organization in case LAN admin is not able to secure centralized data repository.
- Local Area Network requires a constant LAN administration as there are issues related to software setup and hardware failures