Metro Ethernet is essentially the use of carrier Ethernet technology in a metropolitan area that connects subscribers and businesses to a wide area network (WAN) and the Internet, or connects branch offices to an Intranet.

The most widely installed local area network (LAN) technology, Ethernet itself is designed to support high bandwidths with fine granularity and functions as a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for LANs. Ethernet stations are able to communicate by the sending of individual blocks of data, or data packets. Each Ethernet station receives a MAC address, which specifies both the destination and the source of each data packet. Prevalent in corporate and residential networks, Ethernet-based access networks are cost-effective and easy to implement into a customer network, thus driving its ubiquity.