Ghana to launch first phase of National Fibre Network soon

The Government of Ghana is expected to officially commission the completion of work on the fibre optic network connecting the eastern corridor linking Ho in the Volta region and Bawku in the Northern Region of the country by the end of December this year. Information picked up by Biztechafrica indicates that all necessary checks and testing have been carried out by the project contractors on the network and it’s good to go. 

 

 So far indications from the Ministry of Communications are that the government has initiated moves to award the western corridor contract come the first quarter of 2015. The Deputy Minister of Communication, Mr Edward Ato Sarpong, said in an interview with Biztechafrica in Accra that he believes the completion of a national fibre network in Ghana will present opportunities for the country’s entrepreneurs to use it to improve not only their lives but also those of their communities. 

 

The nationwide e-Government infrastructure for Ghana, which is been carried out by Huawei, would extend the national backbone infrastructure to all districts in the country and provide a national data centre and a secondary data centre facility for disaster recovery, and ultimately connect all public institutions, MDAs and MMDAs to a single shared communications and computing infrastructure to facilitate effective delivery of government services to citizens, businesses and others. 

 

 According to the deputy minister, collaboration between the Government, through the Ministry of Communication and National Information Technology Agency will negotiate bulk rates for acquiring leased lines from the local telecommunications operators and ISPs for the links from each district to the national fibre backbone. 

 

 All the sites served by the network will enjoy substantial savings in telecommunications costs from the new network due to the automatic routing of all telephone calls that originate and terminate in a government agency over the Government network.

Source: Biztechafrica.com