His article provides an overview of the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) protocol with a focus on medium access and fairness. The RPR IEEE 802.17 standard is under development as a new high-speed technology for metropolitan backbone networks. A key performance objective of RPR is to simultaneously achieve high utilization, spatial reuse, and Fairness. The core technical challenge for RPR is the design of a fairness algorithm that dynamically throttles traffic to achieve these properties. The IEEE 802.17 RPR working group was formed in early 2000 to develop a standard for bidirectional packet-switched metropolitan rings. In this article the authors describe the RPR fairness algorithm as defined in the IEEE 802.17 protocol. The article presents the algorithm's design objectives, describes the RPR node architecture, outlines the key components of the fairness algorithm, and presents a set of simulation results regarding fairness, throughput, and convergence times. The article presents the design objectives of the RPR fairness algorithm in the context of legacy technologies, Gigabit Ethernet, and synchronous optical network