Things normally become complex when we have to give a proper definition for it. It is applicable for your exams as well as life . SO when it comes to defining a technical suff like Wide Area Network , there arises so many confusions. This post is an effort to define the WAN from three different view points . For any trival explanation of the WAN your elementary books on networking come handy.
Here we are considering three different persons working in a typical company in which we implemented WAN . The end user , The Person who is in-charge of the organization and the technical person. Normally it is the technical definition is what we considered as definition.
User /End user /Customer
From a normal users point of view he did not care much about the LAN and WAN aspects. His main concern is availability. That is if he is getting the data needed for his productivity or not. From his point of view some of the computers in the network , he is getting the data in a faster way and form some other computers , the data transfer is slow. So he may be going to define a WAN as a slow LAN
Your Organizational Head / Account department
Again we assume that he is not much in to computing or technology and his main concern is about the finalcial aspects and asset management. So he is going to define the WAN as we own a LAN and we lease a WAN
Technical Person
The more complex definition comes from this guy. He is going to define the WAN as a DTE to DTE connection over a DCE facility. ie two Data terminal equipment communicating with each other through a set of Data Communication facilities
So the WAN is all the three in to one , Yes it may look like a slow WAN , it is leased rather than the one we own and it is a DTE to DTE over a DCE ,
Hope you can come up with your own custom definitions also