About Us
Established in 1998, YHMAN Limited, a joint venture company of universities in the Region, is responsible for procurement and operation of the Yorkshire & Humberside Metropolitan Area Network, known as the YHMAN. YHMAN provides JANET connection for over 60 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), Further Education Colleges (FECs) and others in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
The YHMAN network is state-of-the-art offering a scalable high speed metro-LAN which enables the high-profile expansion of Information Learning Technology throughout the region across the educational curriculum, widening participation and life-long learning. Further, it provides support for world-wide research, such as the region's prestigious 'White Rose Grid' high-performance computing resources.
The current YHMAN network consists of 15 regional points of presence (RPoP) located at the universities of Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and York. For resilience, excluding York which currently has one RPoP, each of the other Universities has two RPoP diversely located on campus to connect to the YHMAN core/backbone network. Each RPoP is connected by dark fibre cable, with the exception of Hull where leased circuits have been installed.
Each RPoP currently contains switched-Ethernet and DWDM optical wavelength drivers owned by YHMAN Ltd. An IP service is provided to the client organisations connected to the RPoPs by leased-circuits or private cable at multi-Gbps, 100Mbps, 10Mbps or 2Mbps. The network has two resilient connections (known as Regional Network Entry Point or RNEPs) to the SuperJANET academic network currently at 10Gbps each; these are at Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan respectively.
The vast majority of client organisations connect geographically to the nearest RPoP. There is also a consortium of several FECs known as the South Yorkshire Colleges Network (SYCoNET), a wholly managed network that connects to the two RPoPs in Sheffield. Four FECs in North Yorkshire similarly connect via NYnet to the RPoP in York.