y'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 infor- mation 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 address. Only 20% was being exchanged with a location outside the enterprise's physical perimeter. This was a clue that a networking option was needed to focus on a rather limited geographical span-a building or a campus at most-and the solution that emerged became known as the LAN. Chapter 6 Local Area Networking LAN Concepts and Benefits One key concept associated with the traditional LAN is that it acts as a common data highway that allows the linking of internal information resources. This com- mon highway provides a great economic advantage because it allows resources- both software and hardware-to be shared. Another key concept associated with local area networking is that the LAN is responsible for connecting the senders and the receivers, and it discriminates between all the nodes on the network. Traditionally, LANs relied on a shared medium (see Figure 6.1). Everyone was basically connected to the same cable (until about 1987, the medium was generally coax cable, and then other media were built into the recommendations, as well). Due to the increasing demand for bandwidth to the desktop to support multimedia applications, we have moved away from these shared-media environments to configurations that use hubs or switches. Those devices enable each workstation to have its own dedicated connec- tion, increasing the bandwidth available to the workstation. Finally, LANs can be deployed to serve either peer-to-peer arrangements, where essentially every node is equal (i.e., capable of processing and storing in its own right), or server-based networks, in which one computer is the repository (i.e., the server) and provides services on req