High quality communications network for govt

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) in partnership with Neotel and Business Connexion, have successfully installed NGN, which replaces the Government Common Core Network (GCCN), which was used since 2003.

SITA's Chief Executive Officer, Llewellyn Jones earlier this week said the organisation had been actively pursuing a strategy to provide NGN services to render more cost effective and improved offerings to government departments.

“With the NGN in place, we can now provide government departments with better response times and a higher quality network that has the ability to run voice video and data services,” said Jones.

He said the NGN would enable SITA to deliver customer services quicker and the ability to plan capacity and profitable traffic.

This quicker service will allow customers to allocate bandwidth more efficiently as well as translate into lower operational and equipment costs.

“SITA can now also provide additional, as well as customised services to its clients like voice, thereby reducing voice costs, based on the unique requirements of governments, tailored solutions will be developed, which could include video and multi-media,” Jones said.

Applauding the success of the project, Minister for Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said: “Successes such as the NGN project demonstrates the importance of forging the right partnerships between public and private sector, which are important to ensure all parties play a role in transforming government service delivery.”

Neotel, the country's second national telecommunications operator, was awarded a five-year contract to provide national backbone transmission services to support the new NGN.

Neotel's high capacity links connect SITA's sites in major cities and towns countrywide with nearly 700 Megabit per second of transmission bandwidth, nearly doubled the bandwidth SITA has procured in the past.

The investment also entailed an upgrade, of the GCCN backbone from Neotel to Cisco technology, worth in excess of R76 million, excluding maintenance.

Business Connexion supplied, installed and will be supporting the network equipment on the NGN for three years.

Neotel Managing Director, Ajay Pandey said all the company's efforts were directed towards fulfilling their promise to South Africans, which was to reduce the cost of doing business and to bridge the digital divide.

“It took Neotel seven months to successfully deploy the state-of-the-art network, tailored for the specific needs of government, we are particularly pleased that through our partnership with SITA, we have made it possible fro government to improve its service to the citizens,” said Pandey.

Since the GCCN's implementation, the capacity requirements on the network had grown by 15% a year, however, there had been no major bandwidth upgrades to support the increase.

The NGN project was undertaken to address this constraint and with its deployment, SITA can now utilise the network's additional capacity to create more virtual private network, cater for additional ports to connect clients and provide broadband solutions.

The project started in May 2007 and was implemented by October and the migration of government departments was concluded during January 2008.

The migration ensured that government departments continued to function without disruption or loss services during the transition.

Subsequent phases of the NGN will entail installation of dual routes into ten of SITA's switching centres, which will commence in May 2008.

Intrusion Prevention Devices will also be installed at customer sites, which is expected to commence around July 2008.

Article published courtesy of BuaNews