Local Area Transport (LAT) is a Digital Equipment Corporation network communication protocol. The protocol is based on the idea of a relatively small, known number of hosts on a local network sending small network packets at regular intervals. LAT will not work on a wide area network scale as TCP/IP does, as it cannot distinguish large numbers of nodes. For local networks, however, LAT is usually faster and less prone to pauses than TCP/IP. LAT also allows remote connections to services and other network devices, about which TCP/IP has no understanding. The fact that the Server supports both LAT and TCP/IP protocols transparently means that you are not bound by the limitations of either protocol.