Local area network
From Computer History Wiki
A local area network (usually abbreviated to LAN) is a network with restricted geographical scope (usually a single building, or a small group) which operates at high speed (originally in the range of 1 mega-bit/second, although speeds of 1 giga-bit/second and up are now common).
Close cousins are the so-called metropolitan area networks (MANs) which can provide this sort of speed over an entire city (although for technical reasons, not every subscriber in that are would be connected to the same physical network).
