Metropolitan area network

Metropolitan area networks or MANs are large computer networks usually spanning a campus or a city. Common technologies used for this purpose are Asynchronous Transfer Mode, Fiber distributed data interface and Switched multimegabit data service and more recently gigabit ethernet.

For instance a university or college may have a MAN that joins together many of their local area networks situated around a several hectare site. Then from their MAN they could have several wide area network links to other universities or the Internet.

Several notable networks started as MANs, such as the Internet peering points MAE-West and MAE-East and the Sohonet media network.