Scots step up a gear

Six higher education institutions in Edinburgh are pioneering a Scottish superhighway scheme which is in the forefront of academic telecommunications.

Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Napier University, Edinburgh College of Art, Moray House Institute of Education and Queen Margaret College are to be linked by a very high speed, optical fibre Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), allowing them to share information and computing resources as if they were in a single building.

Richard Field, Edinburgh University's vice principal for academic service and information strategy, and convener of the Edinburgh MAN steering committee, said the scheme would improve internal communications and give all six institutions a connection to SuperJANET's (Joint Academic Network) full facilities by July.

SuperJANET was not yet all-pervasive, Dr Field said, and while Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities were on the highest speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), operating at 155 megabits a second, many institutions were on a lower speed service of only 2 megabits. Some of the smaller colleges formerly run by the Scottish Office Education Department have very poor local area networks, the potential basis for exploiting JANET.

The Joint Information Systems Committee is trying to connect as many institutions as possible to JANET, but at present, its policy is to fund only one link per institution. Several of the Edinburgh institutions have split-site campuses which will now all be connected to the network, giving JISC a rapid and cost effective way of meeting its goal, and it stresses that supporting the scheme will not reduce its contribution to other institutions which have still to be connected.

Dr Field said sharing information in collaborative projects would now become much easier, as would distance learning. Access to research units such as the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, which was already available to other institutions on a limited basis, would be available on the full bandwidth. A more mundane but extremely practical advantage was cutting down on travel through videoconferencing, particularly for administrators.

The Edinburgh MAN's optical fibre network will be designed and provided by ScottishTelecom, the recently launched subsidiary of ScottishPower, and Dr Field said that once the higher education institutions were linked up, there were plans to expand links to the National Library and National Museums of Scotland, schools, colleges, industry and commerce.

Ron Matthews, ScottishTelecom's chief executive, said: "Scotland's future prosperity depends more and more on how we harness our intellectual assets. Projects like this are critical to our economic wellbeing.'' The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council is providing Pounds 2.4 million for the national scheme, with Pounds 800,000 coming from JISC. SHEFC is covering around 80 per cent of costs, with institutions expected to fund the remaining 20 per cent. Later this month, SHEFC is expected to give the go-ahead to three other MANs: Strathclyde, covering Glasgow, Strathclyde, Paisley and Glasgow Caledonian Universities; North, covering Aberdeen and the Robert Gordon University and Northern College; and Tayside, covering St Andrews and Dundee University and the University of Abertay Dundee.