MAN

Metropolitan Area Network

• Often one service provider/municipality
• Larger than a Campus Area Network (CAN)/smaller than a Wide Area Network (WAN);
  • We need to pay monthly recurring fees, but we're not going to be using it for internet access. We are going to be using it for dedicated links between our various sites that are located within the city.
  • Connect all of our facilities at a very high level speed.
• Highspeed connectivity over fiber optic
  • We also have many times the opportunity to purchase a service level agreement, that's where our service provider will guarantee that our services stay up.

Metro Ethernet

• ISP places switches near customers
• SMF to customer sites
  • Fiber gives us the highest level of speed
  • At the customer side, a lot of times we'll drop a device called an ONT, that ONT is responsible for taking the optical network and transferring it over to a traditional copper based network.
• Send Ethernet frames between devices
  • We put ethernet frames into the router, the service provider adds some additional tagging, and then pops it out wherever they want it to go.
  • Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a service that service providers can offer where they'll create different traffic classification levels for your different applications, and they can then guarantee different levels of performance based on the application.
  • We have a dedicated physical infrastructure between our sites, so if there was some type of problem on the internet and the internet was down, our metropolitan area network is a separate infrastructure and should be unaffected.