What is LAN Card

With the increasing use of the computers and the networking the local area network of the LAN is one such network type which links the two computers in a connection.
For this connection a Local area network card or the LAN card is required which enables the connection of the computers in a network. It is a piece of hardware which is connected inside the PC linking the computer network.
The LAN Card is of both the common types which are the OSI layer 1 and 2, dealing with the physical as well as the data link layer respectively. It uses the correctly entered MAC addresses for the network to work. This then allows the computers to connect using cables or even wirelessly which then requires a special type of LAN card called the WLAN card.
With the increase in the development and technology, the local area network of the wireless type is now mostly preferred. Therefore a Wireless LAN Card is required for this purpose. The computers with the wireless LAN Card can transmit and receive data via radio waves using the special technology of SST or the Spread-Spectrum technology.
The wireless LANs are available in four basic types which include the 802.11, followed by type a, b and also g.
Any sort of LAN card you use will have some of the typical features of a network card which includes the twisted pair, the AUI socket and also the BNC. It is at the AUI socket that the network cable has to be connected. The LAN cards usually are designed to support the rate transfer to be ranging from 10 to 1000 megabits per second.


A network interface card, network adapter, network interface controller (NIC), or LAN adapter is a computer hardware component designed to allow computers to communicate over a computer network. It is both an OSI layer 1 (physical layer) and layer 2 (data link layer) device, as it provides physical access to a networking medium and provides a low-level addressing system through the use of MAC addresses. It allows users to connect to each other either by using cables or wirelessly.
Although other network technologies exist (e.g. Token Ring), Ethernet has achieved near-ubiquity since the mid-1990s. Every Ethernet network card has a unique 48-bit serial number called a MAC address, which is stored in ROM carried on the card. Every computer on an Ethernet network must have a card with a unique MAC address. Normally it is safe to assume that no two network cards will share the same address, because card vendors purchase blocks of addresses from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and assign a unique address to each card at the time of manufacture.

Madge 4/16Mbps TokenRing ISA NIC.

Ethernet 10Base-5/2 ISA NIC.
Whereas network cards used to be expansion cards that plug into a computer bus, the low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard. These either have Ethernet capabilities integrated into the motherboard chipset or implemented via a low cost dedicated Ethernet chip, connected through the PCI (or the newer PCI express) bus. A separate network card is not required unless multiple interfaces are needed or some other type of network is used. Newer motherboards may even have dual network (Ethernet) interfaces built-in.