Networks by Size

Your earbuds, your school lab and the Internet are all networks. They are clearly not the same kind. One simple question sorts every network into a type: how big an area does it cover?

1Zoom out, one size at a time

Start with one person and keep pulling back. Each new size swallows the one before it.

Zoom out: pocket to planet

Pick a size, or press Play to zoom all the way out.

PANLANMANWAN

PAN — Personal Area Network. Your own devices, around you: phone, earbuds, watch, laptop. About 10 metres across.

2The four types

PANabout 10 m

Personal Area Network

One person's devices — phone, earbuds, watch, laptop.

LANup to about 1 km

Local Area Network

A room, a building or a campus, run by one school or office.

MANabout 30–40 km

Metropolitan Area Network

LANs joined across a town or city.

WANno limit

Wide Area Network

Networks joined across cities, states, countries and continents.

Remember the order

Smallest to largest, the letters go P, L, M, W — Personal, Local, Metropolitan, Wide. Each word is simply a bigger place than the one before.

About those distances

The ranges are rough guides that textbooks use, not hard rules. No network stops being a LAN at 1,001 metres. What really decides the type is the kind of area: a person, a site, a city, or the world.

3Each one is built from the smaller ones

The types are not separate worlds. A MAN is made by joining LANs across a city. A WAN joins LANs and MANs across countries. And the Internet joins all of them. So when you send a photo to a friend in another country, it may start on your PAN, cross your home LAN, travel over a WAN, and arrive on your friend’s LAN.

4Check yourself

Quick Check

What is the main thing that decides whether a network is a PAN, LAN, MAN or WAN?

Quick Check

Which list goes from the smallest network to the largest?

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🎬 The Whole Story at a Glance

PAN — Personal Area Network 📱