WAN

acronym

networking

Wide area network: a network spanning sites, built on circuits somebody else owns and bills you for.

Every design decision here descends from the link being rented. Bandwidth is metered, latency is set by geography and the speed of light, and the circuit can fail in ways you cannot inspect. Compression, caching, deduplication, traffic shaping and the whole wide area optimisation category exist because a megabyte across a wide area costs money and a megabyte across a local one does not.

Also known as: wide area network

Sources

Wide area network as a telecommunications network extending over a large geographic area, typically using leased circuits from carriers

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