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A MAN is larger than a LAN but smaller than or equal in size to a WAN. Think of it as the size of a city or college campus network, which can range anywhere from 5 to 50km in diameter. MANs are typically owned and managed by a single entity. This could be an ISP or telecommunications company that sells its services to end-users in that metropolitan area. For all intents and purposes, a MAN has the same characteristics as a WAN with distance constraints.

Metropolitan Area Network is a network that spans a city. The network consist of various buildings interconnected via either wirelles or fiber optic backbones.

important features which discriminate MANs from LANs or WANs:

• The network size falls intermediate between LANs and WANs. A MAN typically covers an area of between 5 and 50 km range. Many MANs cover an area the size of a city, although in some cases MANs may be as small as a group of buildings.
• A MAN is not generally owned by a single organisation. The MAN, its communications links and equipment are generally owned by either a consortium of users or by a network service provider who sells the service to the users.
• A MAN often acts as a high speed network to allow sharing of regional resources. It is also frequently used to provide a shared connection to other networks using a link to a WAN.

MAN adopted technologies from both LAN and WAN to serve its purpose. Some legacy technologies used for MAN are ATM, FDDI, DQDB and SMDS. These older technologies are in the process of being displaced by Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. At the physical level, MAN links between LANs have been built on fibre optical cables or using wireless technologies such as microwave or radio.