Engineering professor suggests standards for next-generation fiberoptic metro networks

Connect computers in an office, and you've got a local area network (LAN). Connect them on larger scales, such as the United States-wide or global Internet, and you've got a wide area network (WAN). Connect them at a scale in between the local and the global, and you've got a metropolitan area network (MAN), such as that linking San Jose, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities or such as that providing access to a service such as DSL.