Telecommunications Essentials

LAN Basics

In the early 1980s, when most businesses were still using networked mainframes, two changes took place in computing infrastructures. First, there was a general growth in the number of devices in the organization, which created traffic growth. Second, skilled, engineering-oriented users began sneaking their own workstations in to work, and they would ask the company's MIS department to provide networking to the host computer; this created additional challenges for enterprise networking.

The increased traffic made companies step back to figure out how all the information that was creating all the traffic was being used. They found that about 80% of the information used by people within a given business address also came from within that ...