The meeting held at the University of Newcastle on Wednesday 9 July 2003.

Present:

Apologies were received from:

1. Notes of previous meeting

   1.1 Accuracy

   Item 6.1 should read "funding up to 20% of the allocation or £100,000, whichever is higher".

   Otherwise the notes of the meeting held on 23 April 2003 at ULCC were accepted as an accurate record of the meeting.

   1.2 Licensing

   Chris Cheney had completed his actions and Phil Brady thanked him for his efforts.

   Ian Griffiths reported that Peter Walker from the DTI had made a presentation to the Chairs of MANs Group. He had explained that minimal regulations would apply to educational networks such as JANET and the MANs from July 2003 because the electronic services provided over academic networks were not generally provided to members of the public and where the total revenue in providing services to other providers exceeds £5 million a fee would be incurred.

   1.3 Freedom of Information Act

   Paul Kentish had circulated a framework for a MAN publication scheme. He made a powerpoint presentation which will be circulated electronically. There was considerable discussion on various issues raised. For a consortium, it was expected that a separate publication scheme would not be required, but that it would be incorporated within the publication scheme of the lead institution. It was agreed to produce a model publication scheme for MANs that will assist individual MAN companies in getting their publication schemes accepted. Paul Kentish will produce this by the end of July 2003.

   Action: Paul Kentish

   One MAN had been advised that it did not need to register under the Data Protection Act because it did not have any employees. EMMAN would be reviewing its DPA status as part of the FOI registration and will also consider the general case and report back to the Group.

   Action: Ian Griffiths

   1.4 Grid issues paper

   Tim Robinson reported that this would be ready for discussion at the next meeting.

   Action: Tim Robinson, Ed Carter

   The SuperJANET5 requirements event had indicated that Grid access would be part of SuperJANET5 and would involve MANs.

   Linda McCormick will be attending a Grid Stakeholders meeting on 10 July 2003.

    

2. Liaison with JISC Chairs of MANs Group

   Phil Brady and Ian Griffiths reported on the Chairs of MANs meeting held on 9 May 2003. The papers had all been circulated with the exception of the SuperJANET5 paper which was only a draft and superseded by the requirements meeting.

   It had been agreed that UKERNA should organise a meeting between MANs, RBCs and the DfES to discuss Broadband Aggregation.

   UKERNA will be asking MANs to provide a profile of capital funding requirements in order that they can plan to further rationalise the funding arrangements.

   The next meeting will be in the afternoon of 11 December 2003, immediately following the Network Strategy Workshop. It will be a joint meeting with the UK MANs Group to resolve issues of remit and relationship.

   Mark Clark from NNW and the University of Manchester will be the new Chair.

   It was noted that the RBCs also had two national liaison groups, though it was not clear how this mapped to the two MANs groups.

    

3. Broadband Aggregation

   Ian Griffiths reported that the DTI had held a meeting on 2 July 2003 to consult with stakeholder, primarily the RDAs. He reported that there are tight deadlines and that agreement with all parties involved has not yet been reached. The term Regional Aggregation Board (RAB) is now been used instead of SPV. One concern is where the risks will lie.

   The UKERNA meeting on broadband aggregation for RBCs and MANs will be held on 23 July 2003. The East Midlands and West Midlands examples will be presented.

    

4. RPAN amendment negotiations

   The JISC had provided funding for the legal review on behalf of the MANs, channelled through the University of Newcastle. UKERNA felt that this should be provided by the MANs from their own funds, but this would be difficult to administer. It was agreed to raise this issue at the December joint meeting with Chairs of MANs.

   Action: Phil Brady

   Mick Kahn reported that the negotiations had been relatively straightforward and cordial. The main issues had been the audit, the tax treatment of reserves and the obligations for support of ancillary services. MANs had started to sign the amendment.

    

5. SLA negotiations

   Phil Brady and John Linn reported that the measurement of lumpiness of performance and the clarification of user expectations for multicast had been resolved to the satisfaction of UKERNA and the MANs.

    

6. Multicast

   George Howat had circulated a paper on administrative scoping. The Group agreed that a policy was required and that it needed to be developed in conjunction with UKERNA.

   Action: George Howat, John Linn

   The letter on multicast beacons had come out of the blue with insufficient background. This was indicative of the lack of clarity of responsibilities for multicast within UKERNA. Steve Percival will seek clarification. He will ask for the appropriate person taking the lead in UKERNA to attend the next meeting.

   Action: Steve Percival

7. SuperJANET5

   A number of members had attended the SuperJANET5 requirements meeting and all considered it to have been excellent and the openness of the process was welcomed.

   MANs should respond as well as individual insititutions.

   UKERNA will be organising a consultation meeting with MANs to address issues around the conflicting requirements of service and development. It was proposed that possible changes to the Tuesday morning at-risk period should be considered at that meeting.

   UKERNA had also suggested a national framework agreement for router purchase. It was agreed that this should be explored further and that UCISA HG should also be consulted. Maintenance as well as purchase would need to be considered.

8. UKERNA Issues

   8.1 Sponsored connections

Steve Percival reported that the new proposals had been agreed by JCN. A formal document was expected by the end of July 2003. The new tariffs will apply to new connections from July 2003 and to existing connections from July 2004.

The educational licence fee will be £1350 per annum and the non educational licence fee will be £2,850 per annum. The bandwidth charge will be £3,440 per 2Mbps chunk per annum and will be available in 2Mbps chunks up to 10Mbps and then 10Mbps chunks. All figures exclude VAT.

Contention will be allowed on the bandwidth and further guidelines will be provided. It will not be measured to start with. The involvement of MANs in the provision of sponsored connections by sites was not clear. MANs will also need to charge for the use of their resources and bandwidth to avoid cross subsidy. A number of detailed questions were raised and Steve Percival will take these back to UKERNA for clarification:

1. Can sponsored sites use their own IP numbers (outside JANET address range?
2. Will JANET transit bandwidth be sold to individual primary sites (as well as to MANs)?
3. How many licences required for single organisation with connections to two or more MANs?
4. Can sponsored connection invoicing be aligned with academic year from 2004?

Action: Steve Percival

8.2 Calculations   for individual MANs

Steve Percival had provided MANs with the details requested. He was also setting up procedures to keep MANs up to date on the funding changes associated with changes.

8.3 Staff payment review

The issue raised at the previous meeting had been the result of an error in a draft schedule and it was agreed that no further review was necessary at this stage.

8.4 Contract renewal

It was noted that RPAN contracts would need to be renewed by 30 September 2003. The contract negotiation team had polled members and had not identified any significant changes that would be required and would formally inform UKERNA of this.

Action: Mick Kahn, Denis Russell

9. Dates of future meetings

   The next meeting was provisionally scheduled for Wednesday 8 October 2003 in London. However this would be considered in relationship to the planned UKERNA consultation meeting in the autumn to minimise travelling.

   Action: Phil Brady, Mick Kahn, Steve Percival.

   There will be a joint meeting with the Chairs of MANs Group in the afternoon of Thursday 11 December 2003 in Cardiff.

   The following meeting will be on Thursday 22 January 2004 in London.

    

10. Any other business

There was no other business.

Reports from MANs

The following reports were provided by email

Kentish MAN

Following a meeting in March, DMC-Stratex (manufacturers of the radios used by the MAN) have audited the installations during April and found no significant problems. There is now the ability for RAFT (our radio installers and maintainers) to bench test radios before they are installed. DMC-Stratex have also agreed to perform field upgrades instead of waiting for radios to fail. After this the Altium radios (155Mbps) will be at the final hardware level and no further modifications are planned.

At the end of May two ATM interfaces locked up in succession over a weekend and it was not possible to gain access to rectify the problem until early on Monday morning. The whole MAN was affected. Procedures to gain out-of-hours access have since been implemented.

A couple of weeks later the connection between Beacon Hill (mast owned by O2) and the University of Greenwich Medway campus became unstable and then unusable. The reason was tree growth in woodland in the line of sight. It has been possible to make a temporary relocation of the antenna as a work around. They will be move permanently to a higher position on the mast at the end of July. Also a BT LES 155 circuit has been ordered to provide an alternative route from the Blue Bell Hill mast to the UoG Medway campus. This will remove the most significant single point of failure on the MAN. Out-of-band access equipment to allow remote power cycling at key locations has been purchased and will be installed before the new academic year.

Links to most of the FE colleges in Kent are being upgraded from 2 to 10Mbps as part of the Kent New Technology Institute, a HEFCE-funded initiative. This will mean the creation of three new PoPs. There is capital but limited recurrent funding so an effective solution is taking a while to come to fruition. The MAN has also had some exploratory talks with South East Grid for Learning, UKERNA and LeNSE to explore the possibility of some bandwidth aggregation. A private school has approached the MAN and may be the first sponsored connection.

EastNet

UKERNA are keen that EastNet should convert from being an RDN to an RPAN or to being like the Thames Valley Network (where UKERNA provides all the networking). It seems unlikely that the region will be in a position to convert to an RPAN for a couple of years so at least a brief spell as a "TVN" seems highly likely [in which there would seem to be be a case for setting up a UK-NoMANs group :-) ].

NNW

We've signed the RPAN change notice.

We've joined RIPE so that we can have our own IP numbers for commercial activities. While our telcos are cooperative in other areas they are very restrictive on how many numbers they'll let us have. Our commercial activities are expanding, we're in the process of putting a link onto a science park in West Cumbria.

We've installed our first regional gigabit Ethernet link between Manchester and Daresbury and are actively discussing upgrades of other links across the region with our suppliers. The Greater Manchester network (G-MING) is already at gigabit - isn't dark fibre wonderful!

We've almost completed our network upgrade under the HEFCE SuperJANET4 initiative. The last link is on order.

LMN

The change of network operator from the JANET NOSC to Logical went very smoothly and we are pleased with the new service. After two years of continuous procurement activity, we will be pleased to devote more time to technical and business developments.

LMN has now moved from being an RDN to an RPAN and signed the amendment to the RPAN agreement.

During the past year we have launched a staff development programme and our first development project is live – K-Hub, a website for sharing technical expertise.