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The story
1994
The East Midlands Metropolitan Area Network (EMMAN) was established in 1994, initially as a point to point link between The University of Nottingham (UoN) and The Nottingham Trent University (NTU) in order to connect NTU to the Janet network via the SMDS connection at UoN. The link consisted of a dark fibre connection, supplied by the local cable TV franchise, Diamond Cable. The connection consisted of an FDDI ring with two extra dark fibres for development work.
1996
The University of Derby (UoD) was added to EMMAN using an 8 Mbit/s Mercury connection to UoN. During 1996 and early 1997 six Janet secondary connections have been made directly to the MAN at NTU.
1997
The UoN to NTU link was upgraded to 155 Mbit/s ATM together with an ATM connection from NTU to UoN Adult Education Centre.
1998
1998 saw the extension of the MAN to the NTU Clifton site, an alternative route in the Nottingham area and the ordering of a dark fibre link to Derby (installed in January 2000) with a consequent upgrade to ATM at 155 Mbit/s. In addition, EMMAN was directly connected to a 34 Mbit/s ATM link from SuperJanet III at UoN.
1999
The addition of dark fibres from Nottingham to Loughborough, from Loughborough to Leicester, and the provision of ATM switches at Loughborough University and De Montfort University.
2000
The University of Leicester, University College Northampton and the University of Lincolnshire & Humberside to be connected. An additional 155 Mbit/s link from Nottingham to London, which would provide an upgrade for both EMMAN and the West Midlands MAN, MidMAN was made live in March 2000.
The EMMAN logo was designed by Matthew Stimson, who was studying Business & Technology at Nottingham Trent University between the years 1999 and 2001.
2001
On 16 January 2001, the link from EMMAN was switched from SuperJanet III to SuperJanet 4. MidMAN followed on 13 March and the 155 Mbit/s links from Nottingham to London and from Nottingham to Warwick became redundant. Once the SuperJanet 4 connection at Nottingham was operational, both the universities in the City of Nottingham moved from ATM to connecting their LANs to EMMAN with Fast Ethernet. In both cases, some FE colleges connected through the universities' sites continued to use ATM. In April 2001, University College Northampton was connected to EMMAN via DMU. In the same month, the University of Leicester was also connected with a Gigabit Ethernet links to the University of Nottingham and the nearby De Montfort University, for resilience. During the latter part of 2001, the number of FE colleges connected to EMMAN rose to over thirty as UKERNA implemented the national extension of Janet to FE sites. The East Midlands Regional Support Centre was set up to assist the colleges with the implementation and running of their connections to SuperJanet.
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2002
The University of Lincoln (previously the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside) was connected via Nottingham Trent University, bringing the total of HE institutions to eight. These eight institutions entered into negotiation for making the MAN a legal entity and the current company called EMMAN Ltd was formed in March 2002. Most of the links were upgraded from ATM to Gigabit Ethernet. Two additional 8 Mbit/s serial links were also procured which connected the University of Derby to Lincoln and UCN to the University of Leicester, giving Derby and UCN resilient routes to the rest of the MAN and hence to SuperJanet.
2006
During 2006 the backbone was completely overhauled in readiness for the upgrade from SuperJanet 4 to SuperJanet 5. An optical network layer was introduced directly over the fibre links between node sites to provide massive scalability in bandwidth across the backbone. This network utilises Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) with 10 Gbit/s per wavelength. The equipment also has the ability to structure each wavelength into separate multiple 1 Gbit/s channels for the routers that run the production IP network as well as having the capability to provide dedicated point to point links at speeds up to 10 Gbit/s either within EMMAN or for linking to the outside world via the Janet Lightpath service. Two new core nodes were created at the Nottingham Trent University secondary datacentre and the University of Nottingham primary datacentre and the EMMAN topology re-engineered into a dual star format. Each core node has a separate connection into the Janet network and each edge node has dual connections into the core to provide a fully resilient service.
2007
A direct commercial link to the Internet was commissioned to provide Internet access for EMMAN connected customers’ activities that are not eligible for use over the Janet network. Additional public sector organisations connected to Janet via EMMAN.
2008
All of the FE college uplinks into EMMAN were upgraded to 100 Mbit/s.
2009
EMMAN Shared Information Security Services (ESISS) launched in conjunction with HEFCE to provide effective and efficient specialist information security services to UK HE and related sectors.
2012
August - All distribution nodes based at University sites changed to comprise two geographically separate linked nodes, each with a diverse fibre feed. All backbone feeds now via 10 Gbit/s Ethernet IP services running over OTU2 / OTU2e / OTU1e lightpaths.
2013
February - All University connections now running at 2 x 10 Gbit/s.
October - Commercial traffic no longer carried.
2014
April - The regional network and all operational tasks transferred to JANET (UK), the national academic network provider.
2015
March - EMMAN Ltd. is formally dissolved by Companies House on 10 March 2015.
From Wikipedia’s article on EMMAN, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4