David Dahlquist

Cisco Chapter 14 WAN

Digital Subscriber Line

DSL is fast and supports voice and data at the same time. It is asymmetric with faster downloading. It
uses the same old analog phones and cabling that we already have in our homes and businesses. It is
always on without dialing in anywhere. Most importantly, the speed of the DSL service itself does not
degrade with more users on the network.

Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)

This is the equipment and devices that create the basic telephone service between any two phones in
the world. It refers to the combined networks of all telephone companies. The Public in the term is
about the fact that it is available for public .The “switched” part refers to the fact that you can change or
switch between phone calls easily. It was built to support voice traffic, but it is a common means of
accessing the internet. With the advent of digital computers, the telcos began updating the the PSTN to
use digital electrical signals. This gives the PSTN speed and capability to scale to a huge size.

Cable Internet

Many homes also have a cable TV service supplied by a coaxial cable—in other words, over the cable TV
(CATV) cabling. The service like dsl is always on and available. It is asymmetric, with much faster
downstream speeds. It uses a cable modem and router, which may be in a single device or in separate
devices. Cable speeds do not degrade due to the length of the cable (distance from the provider).
However, the speed of cable Internet does degrade as more and more traffic is sent over the cable by
other users, because the cable is shared among, whereas DSL does not suffer from this problem

Packet switching

Packet switching means that the devices in the WAN do more than pass the bits or electrical signal from
one device to another. With packet switching, the provider’s networking devices interpret the bits sent
by the customers by reading some type of address field in the header. The service makes choices,
switching one packet to go in one direction, and the next packet to go in another direction to another
device depending on some algorithm to provide best service.

Frame Relay

It is a popular WAN service and has been deployed over a decade. I is a non-broadcast multi-access
network that uses packet switching. It provides a portion of dedicated bandwidth to each user. It Came
out of the X.25 technology without the error correcting components. It is complex but versatile and is
less costly than leased lines and sometimes quite considerably. The problem can be with only having a
single point of failure which can be costly.