s a group of buildings under the control of one entity, such as a college or a single company). One could argue that the terms MAN and CAN can be interchanged and, in some cases, this is true (conversely, there are plenty of people out there who would argue that a CAN exists only in certain specific circumstances and that calling a CAN by any other name is madness). The difference is usually that in a campus environment, there will probably be conduits to allow direct physical connections between buildings, while running private fiber between buildings in a city is generally not possible. Usually, in a city, telecom providers are involved in delivering some sort of technology that allows connectivity through their networks. MANs and CANs may, in fact, be WANs. The differences are often semantic. If two buildings are in a campus but are connected via Frame Relay, are they part of a WAN or part of a CAN? What if the Frame Relay is supplied as part of the campus infra- structure, and not through a telecom provider? Does that make a difference? If the campus is in a metropolitan area, can it be called a MAN? Usually, a network's designers start calling it by a certain description that sticks for the life of the network. If a team of consultants builds a WAN and refers to it in the doc- umentation as a MAN, the company will probably call it a MAN for the duration of its existence. Add into all of this the idea that LANs may be connected with a CAN, and CANs may be connected with a WAN, and you can see how confusing it can be, especially to the uninitiated. The point here is that a lot of terms are thrown around in this industry, and not everyone uses them properly. Additionally, as in this case, the definitions may be nebulous; this, of course, leads to confusion. You must be careful about the terminology you use. If the CIO calls the network a WAN, but the engineers call the network a CAN, you must either educate whoever is wrong or opt to communicate with each party using its own language. This issue is more common 