Just as the name implies, a local area network (LAN) is usually restricted to spanning a particular geographic location such as an office building, a single department within a corporate office, or even a home office.

Back in the day, you couldn’t put more than 30 workstations on a LAN, and you had to cope with strict limitations on how far those machines could actually be from each other. Because of technological advances, all that’s changed now, and we’re not nearly as restricted in regard to both a LAN’s size and the distance a LAN can span. Even so, it’s still best to split a big LAN into smaller logical zones known as workgroups to make administration easier.