LAN – Local Area Network
A LAN connects network devices over a relatively short distance. A networked office building, school, or home usually contains a single LAN, though sometimes one building will contain a few small LANs (perhaps one per room), and occasionally a LAN will span a group of nearby buildings. In TCP/IP networking, a LAN is often but not always implemented as a single IP subnet.
In addition to operating in a limited space, LANs are also typically owned, controlled, and managed by a single person or organization. They also tend to use certain connectivity technologies, primarily Ethernet and Token Ring.
What’s it all about?
Category 5E/6 Structured Cabling is a standard that enables you to connect all of your telephone and computer peripherals in a single, easy to manage, network cabling infrastructure, and once you’ve had structured cabling installed, you will wonder how you have managed all this time without it. Most newer buildings should have Structured cabling already installed – if your building doesn’t then its time to get it done. Also look into getting Fibre Optic cabling installed to your building from as many providers as you can afford.
So, what does it take to install it? Well initially, with the help of an office floor plan, you need to determine where all your telephones, fax machines, modems, PCs, Printers, etc, need to be installed and working. Once this information is available, your next step is to choose a location in your building that can become a communications room or area (this may already exist). Make sure it is a lockable and well lit and ventilated room or area. If you have multiple floors than you may need to cable each floor accordingly and run feeder cables between the floors to link them. Also make sure there is access to your telcos access cable or fibre tail in the same room or allow to run extra cabling to the demarcation point.
A single cable can now be run, from the comm’s room or area, one to each location that you originally identified on your office floor plan. Depending on the size of your building and the nature of your business, a large number of cables may well need to be run which means specific cabling routes will need planning and cable trunking will almost certainly be required. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of outlets that you are going to need around your building and it is a wise idea to install extra ones for future expansion or in the event of office furniture relocation.
Once all the cables have been installed they need to be terminated. Special sockets can now be installed on the cable ends that are situated around your building, these are a type known as RJ45. The other end of the cables are presented together on patch panels, which in effect, are rows of RJ45 outlets, usually housed in a cabinet structure. Each socket is labelled with its own personal number and its corresponding patch panel outlet is marked with the same number in the patch cabinet.
After the structured cabling is all finished and tested thoroughly, you need to make this new infrastructure work for you. Into your new patch cabinet, you need to present your LAN in the form of a bank of switches, and finally you require the same type of presentation in the patch cabinet from your telephone system. All your available telephone extensions can be presented on the same type of patch panels as the cabling uses, and their extension numbers marked on for each outlet.
All that’s left to do now is plug into the sockets, all your telephones, PCs etc. and make a list of the socket numbers you have used. At the patch panel end, you have to now connect the relevant socket outlet presentations to either a telephone extension or your LAN switches. This is done by using patch leads, which are leads with RJ45 plugs on each of their ends, to make the final connections necessary.
Any future changes or relocation’s (MACS – moves, adds, changes) of staffing positions can now be easily managed and you are now in full control of your communications networking infrastructure.
Technical stuff
This system of cabling allows you high speed data transmission on an integrated totally flexible network. It will give you the infrastructural platform upon which can be based the needs of both telephony and data communications now and in the future.
Voicecom guarantee all of its structured cabling installations meet with Industry Standards and are certified on completion. This can only be achieved by using highly skilled engineers, top quality components, cable and accessories. A comprehensive test is conducted at the end of each installation and the results in report format, are provided by us for you.
WAN – Wide Area Network
As the term implies, a WAN spans a large physical distance. The Internet is the largest WAN, spanning the Earth.
A WAN is a geographically-dispersed collection of LANs. A network device called a router connects LANs to a WAN. In IP networking, the router maintains both a LAN address and a WAN address.
A WAN differs from a LAN in several important ways. Most WANs (like the Internet) are not owned by any one organization but rather exist under collective or distributed ownership and management. WANs tend to use technology like ATM, Frame relay and X.25 for connectivity over the longer distances.
