Hack the Route Start free Open app Wireless and network types
Network types: LAN, WAN, MAN, PAN, SAN
Networks named by their reach: a room, a building, a city, the world, or a storage fabric.
A PAN is a person's own devices (Bluetooth earbuds, a phone). A LAN is one site's network, wired or wireless (WLAN), usually owned by whoever uses it. A MAN joins sites across a city; a WAN joins sites across countries over lines leased from carriers, or across the internet with a VPN. A SAN is a separate network just for disks (iSCSI or Fibre Channel). Apart from the names, a network is client-server when a few machines serve and the rest ask, or peer-to-peer when every machine does both.