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Wide Area Network (WAN)
A WAN (Wide Area Network) is a computer network that covers a wider area than a LAN (Local Area Network) such as cities, countries, continents and the whole world.
A point-to-point link in a Wide Area Network (WAN) provides a single, pre-established communication path from corporate office sites through a carrier network and are usually leased from a carrier (thus are often called leased lines) that are run on dedicated pairs of wire and facilities and are priced based on bandwidth and distance between two connected end points.
A Wide Area Network (WAN) router is a carrier-class router designed for Internet Service Providers to process up to several terabits of data per second and to support optical networking and electrical transport technologies.
A Wide Area Network (WAN) must be able to grow to connect sites that may be many thousands of miles apart and provide sufficient capacity to allow computers to communicate simultaneously. Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a technology that makes it easy to expand networks due to its shared switching architecture with pre-posistioned ingress and egress ports that are pre-positioned around the world on large carrier networks such as AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, BT Infonet, etc.
Whether your company can benefit from Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration is a function of how your business uses its existing WAN connections. For example, if your business is mostly involved in passing e-mails and small documents, or has all its offices in the same city, then it probably wouldn't make much sense to use WAN acceleration. However, if your company sends large amounts of data such as video graphic design, financial or scientific data, software, or any other large files on a regular basis over long distances, WAN acceleration just might be a good solution to speed up your existing WAN without having to pay monthly for added network capacity.
MPLS gives network operators a great deal of flexibility to divert and route traffic around link failures, congestion, and bottlenecks.
Frame relay is more secure than IP VPNs in creating closed user groups, which completely eliminate the threat of a user on one customer network using a Frame Relay Access Device (FRAD) to access another customer FRAD.
On a Wide Area Network (WAN), IP VPN packets are encrypted so that, without a decryption key, Customer B cannot decipher content encrypted by Customer A.
IP VPNs protect data across the network by using encryption, digital certificates, and firewalls to turn layer 3 any-to-any IP routing open user groups into closed IP VPN user groups. These security measures not only add complexity and overhead, but they can be compromised. The bottom line is simply this: there is greater risk of an IP VPN user on one customer’s network using a router to access another customer’s router across the IP VPN network.
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