Business, education and government entities use wide area networks to relay data among staff, students, clients, buyers, and suppliers from various geographical locations. In essence, this mode of telecommunication allows a business to effectively carry out its daily function regardless of location. The Internet may be considered a WAN.
Related terms for other types of networks are personal area networks(PANs), local area networks (LANs), campus area networks (CANs), or metropolitan area networks (MANs) which are usually limited to a room, building, campus or specific metropolitan area respectively.

Design Options
Van textbook definition regions, countries, or even a computer network that spans the world. However, computer networking protocols and concepts in terms of application, it is used to transmit data over long distances for computer networking technology to be the best as WANs, LANs can and the human and other between local computer networking architectures. The difference between the LAN (such as Ethernet or Wi-Fi-form) 1/2 work in the physical layer of the network are geared towards, and thus tens of miles or kilometers, hundreds Data or even thousands can not move stems from the fact.
WANs do not just necessarily connect physically disparate LANs. A CAN, for example, may have a localised backbone of a WAN technology, which connects different LANs within a campus. This could be to facilitate higher bandwidth applications, or provide better functionality for users in the CAN.
Connection Technology
Many technologies are available for wide area network links. Examples include circuit switched telephone lines, radio wave transmission, and optic fiber. New developments in technologies have successfully increased transmission rates. In ca. 1960, a 110 bit/s (bits per second) line was normal on the edge of the WAN, while core links of 56 kbit/s to 64 kbit/s were considered fast. As of 2014, households are connected to the Internet with ADSL, Cable, Wimax, 4G or fiber at speeds ranging from 1 Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s and the connections in the core of a WAN can range from 1 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s.