WAN (Wide Area Network) types

by Karun Subramanian on August 27, 2015

There are 5 major WAN technologies available

Point to Point Link

Uses a public career for establishing WAN connectivity

Technology	Details
SLIP (Serial Line IP)	Enables serial devices such as modems to connect to remote network Asynchronous Slow speed Little or no security
Point to Point Protocol (PPP)	Successor of SLIP Asynchronous and Synchronous operation More security features than SLIP
Point to Point tunneling protocol	Relies on PAP,CHAP or EAP to provide encryption Developed by Microsoft Used in VPNs
Layer 2 Forwarding protocol	Used in VPN with PPP Little or no security Developed by CISCO
Layer 2 Tunneling protocol	Used in VPN Uses IPSec for encryption Uses UDP port 1701

Circuit Switched Network

Good fit for always-on connection. A dedicated circuit path is established for each session (much like a telephone call)

Technology	Details
Digital Subscriber Link (DSL)	Uses Analog Telephone lines
Data Over Cable Services Interface Specification	Uses Cable TV network
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)	Users Analog Telephone lines that have been converted to digital signaling.

Packet Switched Network

In this network, the bandwidth is shared among the nodes.

Technology	Details
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)	Packets are encapsulated by Label Edge Router with a MPLS label that is used for routing Very high speed. Can transport ATM,SONET or Ethernet frames
X.25	1. Old technology, primarily outside USA 2. Uses Packet Level Protocol (PLP) in Network later and Link Access Procedure balanced (LAPB) at the datalink layer
Frame Relay	Uses HDLC (High Level Data Link Control) encapsulation Can be used on SVC (Switched Virtual Circuit) or PVC (Permanent Virtual Circuit) No error correction, but very high speed
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)	Fixed length cells (53 bytes) that can contain voice, video or data
Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)	Used in Fiber Optic Network. Very high speed, high availability. Successor is Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS)	Datagram based

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