Customer Needs Assessment

Types of Connections

Note that these zones are classifications for convenience; they provide a way to talk about the different needs that a network design must serve. Although typical of many network environments, they do not have hard boundaries.

As mentioned earlier, network access zones often overlap: the user who unplugs his or her laptop from its wired connection and uses a wireless connection from a colleague’s desk may move only a short distance and stay in essentially the same physical location. In other words, the area is acting as both a private wired zone and a private wireless zone.

For purposes of network design, it can be useful to look at overlapping network access zones separately because the best network design may use different technologies to provide an optimal access control solution for the different patterns of work.

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