In that case, you probably have multiple servers, switches and other network devices to control your LAN. A LAN can be as big as it needs to be, with thousands of devices. This is the smallest LAN you can have but you can then grow it with more devices. When you connect a computer to your router, you have a LAN with 1 router and 1 computer.

The printer is connected to my LAN and since all my devices are that as well, they can see the printer.Ī LAN is not something that you have to explicitly set, it is just is. For example, at my home, I have a network printer (yeah, I know, a printer in 2018…) that I can print out from any of my computers or phones. LANs is very useful when you have a group of computers or devices that need to share the same resources. Your router is giving out IP addresses to your devices and is handling all the traffic between these devices. You probably have a router and that router is connected to everything in your house. LAN stands for Local Area Network and is essentially you home network.

To make any sense of this article, you will first need to understand what a LAN is. If you want to move files to a server or NAS, wired is the way to go, if you want to get the best speed possible from your home network. Wireless networks are not as stable as wired networks and will introduce a ton of other factors.

It should be mentioned that I will only talk about a wired network in this article. To increase the speed of your LAN, you need to investigate your network to find the block, purchase new network cables if the current ones are old enough and some other tricks mentioned in this article. There are also tools, like Totusoft Lan speed, to test your LAN speed. If you are here, I guess you are in the same boat as I once was.įor measuring your LAN speed, you can drag and drop a big file and see how fast it will go. Something had to be done so I could get the most out of my new NAS. I expected speeds of 100MB/s but ended up with 30-40/MB/s, something that I wasn’t happy with at all. The goal was to transfer movies and files fast over the network. When I bought my first NAS, I put it in a closet, far away from me or anyone else.

Lan speed test tool