Fife and Tayside Metropolitan Area Network FaTMAN creation - 1995 Press Release

Press Release: issued 7th June 1995

The University of Abertay Dundee, the University of Dundee and the University of St Andrews are to co-operate in the creation of an innovative high-speed computer network in Fife and Tayside. The first phase of the project, which will provide links between the three institutions using fibre optic cable, will cost over half a million pounds and has been supported by generous grants from the Scottish Higher Educational Funding Council and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

The network, which is called the Fife and Tayside Metropolitan Area Network (FaTMAN), is one of four MANs being built by Scottish universities: the others are centred on the cities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Of these, FaTMAN will have the longest open fibre link in the connection from St Andrews to Dundee. It is planned for the network to be operational by September with a data transfer rate of 155 megabits per second.

A new telecommunications company, Scottish Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Scottish Power, has won the contract to provide the optical fibre infrastructure. Communications equipment has been ordered from Chernikeeff of Middlesex and K-NET of Surrey.

The network will enable the Universities to participate more fully in the SuperJANET network and to develop new network services. SuperJANET is a development of JANET (the Joint Academic Network) that provides connections between all UK universities and research centres and the Internet. The new services will support additional ways of working, involving video-conferencing, the "virtual library", electronic publishing, distance learning, multi-media teaching and collaborative research.

Dr Malcolm Bain, Convener of the FaTMAN Management Committee said "It is widely accepted that the British universities network - SuperJANET - is the most advanced wide area network of its type in the world. Metropolitan Area Network developments like FaTMAN will provide the development path for SuperJANET and, in this respect, Scotland is leading the way in the UK. It is to the credit of managers of the computing and network services in the three universities that such a network is now under construction. This augurs well for the collaboration that will be needed in the future to ensure that maximum benefit is obtained for higher education and research from this investment."