LOCAL AREA NETWORK

usually we can use LANs in campus, in a single office or in a building.

Point To Point communication

Figure 1: Point-to-point connections It is local area network, according to name it is use for local areas like offices, schools, universities, colleges and campus. The LAN market has seen several technologies such as Ethernet, Token Ring, Token Bus, FDDI, and ATMLAN. Some of these technologies survived for a while, But Ethernet is far better from all of these.
LAN (Local Area Network) is network of a company where the computers can be connected up to limited area. Approximately this network can be configured well up to 100 meters distance. The computers are connected through devices like Switches. These kinds of networks are limited to a building or campus. The users can share the network resource and securities can be implemented only within the network.

In (a), two computers require one connection, while in (b), three computers require three connections. In (c), four computers requires six connections. The number of connections for N computers is proportional to the square of N, namely N(N-1)/2. In practice, the cost is high because many connections follow the same physical path. Figure 2 illustrates the situation with five computers located in two locations.

Figure 2: Different locations

There are six connections between the two locations, more than the total number of computers being connected. Another computer added to location 1 increases the number of connections between the two locations to nine. Apart from the fact that point-to-point communication does not scale, as the physical distance between computers increases, the cost of installing the point-to-point connections becomes prohibitively expensive. PUBLIC SWITCHED TELEPHONE NETWORK
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the network of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks. It consists of telephone lines, fiber optic cables, cellular networks, communications satellites, and undersea telephone cables, all inter-connected by switching centers, thus allowing any telephone in the world to communicate with any other. A dial-up connection uses a PSTN or other line to access remote servers via modems at both the source and destination The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sets standards and policy for telecommunications transmission equipment in the United States The place where two telephone systems meet is the point of presence (POP) The PSTN is composed of telephone exchanges networked together to form a nationwide (and worldwide) telephone communications system. It is public because (theoretically) the system is available to anyone who can afford the service. All calls are switched, that is, a caller's conversation is broken into pieces (the pieces are called packets) and these pieces are sent simultaneously over many connections to reach a receiver at the other end. The individual pieces are 'swtiched' from one telephone device to another until they reach their final destination at the receiving end. All phones in the PSTN are networked in that any phone can make a call to any other phone because all the local phone systems around the country are connected to each other. Connecting communications systems together is called networking. Thus, all phone systems in the country are part of a nationwide network.