This paper discusses the use of Carrier Ethernet for the transport of UMTS radio access network as a alternative solution for the gradual migration towards pure IP-based RAN. By means of Pseudo-Wire technique, the ATM service is emulated over the underlying Ethernet network. Within this work, the performance of such Carrier Ethernet based UTRAN is evaluated and compared to the ATM-based UTRAN of UMTS Release 99, in particular the transport efficiency, the delay and packet losses of the Iub. Another contribution of this paper is to investigate the parameter settings to provide a guideline for the optimum configurations.