Intranet vs internet vs LAN

Answer 1

An intranet is similar to the internet itself in many ways, but for the fact it is a severely reduced version, accessible and editable only by certain listed parties. Information can be posted, edited and retrieved from it in much the same way as the Internet as a whole; however, it can be considered much more reliable as (for example) employees within a company can be confident that the company intranet system holds valid information, whereas information on the web is not always entirely reliable and should be treated with appropriate skepticism and caution when being cited.

A WAN (I'll assume you know what it stands for), is exactly what it says on the tin. It is a network between terminals spread out over a large distance. It is a more secure data transfer method than the public Internet: of course assuming said network has safeguards and security protocols, for which there would be no reason to assume it wouldn't.

In conclusion and to round to your answer: An intranet is a system akin to a miniature "world-wide-web" only accessible to predefined users. Whereas, a Wide Area Network is in its simplest form a much further expanded version of the basic LAN networks employed by many businesses, governing bodies, educational institutions and other independent entities with use of a computer system.

Examples:

Canon Global Inc. as an international company do make use of an internal network: The Canon Intranet.

Whereas...

Major Oil Companies may well find it easier to run a WAN, as they have many derivative branches that perform independent tasks long distances away from one another that must share information (i.e. extraction, distillation, offices, etc).

Answer 2

All three have different purposes.
Intranet is the computer network of a large organization.
The Internet covers the whole world.
LAN is a local area network as in a small company or in a private home.

Note: A better explanation could be found via http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_the_difference_between_Intranet_and_LAN.

Answer 3

An Intranet is a network of workstations within a particular boundary such as an organization with maximum security measures. It is different from LAN in such a way that a LAN has minimal security. Moreover, A LAN does not make use of MIME, SMTP etc that an Intranet uses and it sticks to the basic TCP/IP model. A general example of an Intranet is a website that can be accessed within a particular organization. Resource sharing is the best example for LAN.

Answer 4

A LAN is the physical local network (network cables and network devices); an intranet is a local version of the Internet (a company webpage is accessed with a local web browser and local IP address)

Answer 5

An intranet, or "Internal Network", is a system that is often run across a Local Area Network (LAN) but also can be used across a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), Campus Area Network (CAN) or even a Wide Area Network (WAN).

The internet, on the other hand, is unequivocally a WAN.