The meeting held at ULCC on Wednesday 23 April 2003.

Present:

Apologies were received from:

1. Notes of previous meeting

   The notes of the meeting held on 16 January 2003 at ULCC were accepted as an accurate record of the meeting.

    

2. Matters arising

   2.1 Risk Assessment

   Mick Kahn had brought the issues raised at the previous meeting that could be addressed by SuperJANET5 to the attention of UKERNA and the Chairs of MANs Group.

    

3. Liaison with JISC Chairs of MANs Group

   Phil Brady reported the Chairs of MANs Group will meet on 9 May 2003 and then immediately before the Network Strategy Workshop. The chair of the group is Richard Field and the secretary Ann Lloyd (A.Lloyd@jisc.ac.uk).

    

4. Legal matters

   4.1 Licensing

   Chris Cheney made a presentation on the issues related to the recent proposals for the general conditions under the Communications Bill. Copies of the slides will be circulated to the group. Whilst the intent of the proposals was to be welcomed, there was some concern about the possible requirement for inappropriate standards and some ambiguous wording. Chris Cheney will feed back appropriate comments on behalf of the Group.

   Action: Chris Cheney

   4.1 Freedom of Information Act

   Paul Kentish reported that MANs will need to comply with the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act where they are separate legal entities. The general view was that MANs should maximise their publication scheme to minimise work in the future. These needed to be submitted by 31 December 2003.

   Paul Kentish offered to provide an example scheme, drawing on the JISC model and UKERNA’s scheme, when available.

   Action: Paul Kentish

    

5. Development Plans

   5.1 SuperJANET5

The Group identified a number of issues that it would like to be addressed by SuperJANET5. It was noted that the project needed to include the MANs in order to deliver a coherent end-to-end service. The main issues were:

• The provision of capital injections for MAN upgrades
• Increased resilience to the backbone and institutions
• Discussion with the MANs on connection points
• The funding/bandwidth provision model, particularly for FECs
• The inclusion of monitoring
• Out of hours support

It was noted that UKERNA now appeared to be more relaxed about connections between MANs where it is for resilience.

Ian Griffiths reported on the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) project, a high-level government initiative for the cost effective and ubiquitous purchase of bandwidth for the whole public sector. If this went ahead there would be significant implications for MANs. It was being piloted in the East Midlands by the RDA, RBC and MAN. SuperJANET was the obvious backbone. Jim Hendry reported that an alternative, bottom up approach with similar objectives was taking place in the West Midlands.

            5.2 IPv6

John Linn commented on the recently issued letter on piloting IPv6. He felt that a road map for the introduction of the service on JANET would help planning.

            5.3 QoS

There were no major issues at present, though MANs would have to be involved as management domains.

            5.4 Multicast

Some MANs had not implemented multicast due to lack of demand.

Phil Brady reported that an appropriate statement on the immaturity of the service had been proposed for the SLA.

George Howat reported that UKERNA had not yet responded to his request that they produce an addressing plan to allow traffic to be limited to sites, MANs etc.

A number of people reported that GRID applications were reaching the stage where they could generate significant amounts of traffic, generating real demand for additional bandwidth. It was agreed that it was important that this should be done via the MANs and SuperJANET unless a very good case for alternative was made to avoid fragmentation of service provision. A number of issues were discussed, including the funding model, limitation on usage and conflict between GRID and other traffic.

Communication is happening (e.g. with the GNT), but there are no clear plans. It was agreed that an issues paper from the MANs’ perspective should be produced for circulation to interested parties. This should be complete by the end of the summer. Tim Robinson and Ed Carter will draft and edit this.

Action: Tim Robinson and Ed Carter.

Ed Carter reported that all the GRID committees were under review and that he was continuing to liaise with the GNT.

6.   UKERNA Issues

Steve Percival joined the meeting for this item

            6.1 Funding Review

Steve Percival reported that UKERNA had drafted the revisions to the RPAN contract and that it was with their lawyers. UKERNA proposed to ask a subset of the Chairs of MANs Group to review the contract on behalf of MANs. The UK MANs Group were of the shared strong opinion that this was not appropriate as the UK MANs Group had negotiated the initial contract and this specific change and had the appropriate knowledge. Steve Percival agreed to take this back to UKERNA.

The contracts subgroup was agreed to be Denis Russell, Phil Brady, Mick Kahn and Dave Vinograd.

It was agreed to request funding from JISC for a lawyer to review the changes on behalf of all MANs. Phil Brady will liaise with the Chairs of MANs Group to facilitate this. Ian Griffiths offered to channel the payment through NTU.

Action: Phil Brady.

It was noted that the changes will apply to the whole of the current funding year. The telecommunications payment has been recalculated based on the complex formula as at 1 October 2002. Any changes during the funding year will be made on the basis of actual cost for access links plus transit costs. The formula will not be recalculated in the future. The Group asked Steve Percival to provide the details of the calculation to each MAN so that they can understand it.

Action: Steve Percival

Steve Percival reported that MANs would be able to hold reserves from the UKERNA funding of up to 20% of the allocation or £100,000, whichever was the lower.

It was noted that a review the staff payments was due by September 2003 as most MANs considered them to be too low. Steve Percival will produce some initial thoughts.

Action: Steve Percival

MANs and UKERNA will need to agree whether to extend the contracts for a further three years by September 2003. The subgroup identified above will review the contract to see if the Group wishes to propose any changes in light of experience and any changed circumstances.

A number of MANs would prefer the funding year to be aligned with the academic year. Other MANs have already adjusted their outgoing payments to the October to September funding year and would not welcome further changes. Steve Percival will consider whether a change can be made for some MANs.

            6.2 Sponsored Connections

Steve Percival reported that a paper had gone to the last JCN and that a revised paper would go to the next JCN on 28 May, when approval was expected. It is anticipated that the prices will go up. Existing sponsored connections will get one years grace.

The Group asked UKERNA to provide some indicative figures as soon as possible to assist planning.

Action: Steve Percival

The provision of performance figures to MANs on a regular basis had started, though had not filtered through to all MANs yet.

Steve Percival will reissue the central fault management document incorporating the changes discussed at the last meeting.

It was suggested that access to the appropriate parts of the JANET contact database, as specifically allowed in the JANET terms and conditions, would ensure that contact information used by UKERNA and the MANs was in step and as up to date as possible.

7.  Dates of Future Meetings

The next meeting will be held on Wednesday 9 July in Newcastle.

The following reports were received from MANs.

LMN
A contract has been awarded to Logical for the operation of the network. The changeover is scheduled for 30 April 2003. Pete White has been appointed LMN Operations Manager. He will oversee the operations and telecomms contracts and project manage changes and developments to the network.

Welsh Networking Ltd

The SWMAN is running well, even the link to Aberystwyth, (for which we have ordered a reconfiguration from ATM to fast Ethernet).

UKERNA tell us that we are consistently failing to meet SL1 (< 1 failure per 1,000 hours) but have not punishing us. The failure is due to PoP routers crashing bringing down multiple connections. We are putting pressure on the maintainers of our PoP routers to cure the problems.

Professional Indemnity Insurance is very expensive!

The Kentish MAN

The MAN is now beginning to reach a state of maturity. Timing issues have been solved and Stratex (the manufacturer of the 155Mbs radios) has been undertaking a survey to ensure that the installation of its equipment is up to standard. There is still a minor problem with higher than normal error rates at one of the radio masts. A 3^rd party paging system was found to be operating above the level permitted in its licence. It has reduced the signal strength but the problem has not been completely solved and Stratex have been asked to investigate. This is not seriously service-affecting as long as the alternative route for the traffic doesn’t fail. Equipment to improve battery back up and allow out-of-band access for power cycling remote equipment has been purchased and will be tested and installed during May and June.

Consultants working for SEEDA have been in contact regarding the feasibility of providing more fibre in Kent. Meanwhile the FE colleges connected via the MAN are seeking more bandwidth as part of the Kent New Technology Institute (KNTI) which has funding to support such upgrades.

LeNSE

No significant changes, developments or problems to report in the LeNSE network. The network has been extremely reliable over this last period. Our first and only (so far) specialist college - Treloar College - was connected in March after some (apparently special?) firewalling arrangements had to be put in place at the college. No QoS monitoring/re-marking has been enabled yet.

No contractual issues to reports (we’re grateful for the work being put in by members of this group) apart from discovering errors in UKERNA’s view of our RPAN SLA figures - which have now been corrected (marginally improved).