•          The eGovernment network infrastructure will be built upon previous investments by the Ministry of Finance in fibre optic connectivity between key MDAs in Accra, and will utilize capacity from the national communications backbone company, (NCBC) which is now a part of Vodafone Ghana.

•          The project will provide additional network switching and routing equipment to refresh a lot of what is currently installed at the MDAs to be served by the  project

•          The network infrastructure will in addition to fibre optic capacity, include wireless last mile connectivity over most of Accra,  all the regional capitals in the country, and up to ten (10) additional municipal and district capitals that are located in close proximity to the national fibre backbone.

•          The project will provide equipment for connecting up to 550 MDA facilities to the wireless last mile access network

•          The project will provide for the interconnection of all the ministries in Accra with fibre optic cable, with the core network running at 10Gbps (Gigabits per second) and all ministries enjoying a minimum connectivity speed of a 1Gbps with each other and to the National Data Centre.

•          The network will provide a single secure gateway to the internet and implement services such as access control, spam filtering, firewalls and anti-virus defences for the government network as a whole and between the individual MDAs as may be required.

•          The network will also provide for the centralisation of all government voice and fax traffic within the network and directly interconnect all the existing PABX of connected MDAs and MMDAs, saving the government hugely on the cost of inter agency communications.

•         Brand new IP PABX switch components will be installed at the larger MDA locations to provide voice circuit termination and forwarding facilities.

•          Local area networks (LANs) in all the Ministries in Accra will be upgraded and equipped under this project and several new LANs will be deployed in various beneficiary Assemblies and MDAs in the regions and districts. In all a total of 6300 LAN ports will be deployed at the various beneficiary sites to support both voice and data access to the network.

•          All 170 district assembles in the country will be connected to the national eGovernment network infrastructure by utilising various terrestrial connectivity options.

•          It is intended that the leased lines to each of the districts will tie-in  with all other parts of  the  communications network and to the central monitoring systems at the Network Operations Centre (NOC)

•          Government, through the MoC and NITA’s facilitation, 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 eGovernment network. This will lead to a substantial savings in domestic telephony charges for government.

THE BENEFITS

•          The network has been designed with the objective of running at a low operating cost  when compared to the total investment  in the e-Government network and will allow for cost effective scaling up as the capacity  and geographical  coverage requirements increase.

•         The proposed solution will foster the participation of local communications network operators in the e-Government network.

INTERNET PROTOCOL (IP) BACKBONE

In order to link all the 15 towns and cities that will have WiMAX coverage, the network will be built on an IP backbone that will run over the infrastructure of the National communications backbone company (NCBC), the subsidiary of Vodafone Ghana which manages the national fibre optic backbone infrastructure. The IP backbone will initially operated at the speed of Gigabit Ethernet (GE), and should support easy expansion to 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds.

The figure above shows the WIMAX BTS physical layout across the regions in Ghana.

While the Metro Area Network in Accra will consist of a fibre optic network as well as a WiMAX Wireless access network overlay, the Metro Area Network in all the Cities except for Accra will be wholly Wimax based as shown in the following figure:

THE DISTRIBUTION OF WIMAX COVERAGE

The e-Government network will provide WiMAX coverage over the following district municipal and metropolitan assemblies as part of the project:

1.   Accra

·         AMA

·         Adenta

·         Ledzokuku

·         Weija

·         Ga East District

 

2.   Tema

·         TMA

·         Ashiaman

  

3.   Kumasi

4.   Koforidua

5.   Ho

 

6.   Cape Coast

·         Cape Coast

·        KEEA

7. Takoradi

 

8. Sunyani           

 

9. Tamale     

 

10 Wa        

 

11 Bolgatanga   

 

12 Nkawkaw      

 

13 Obuasi

 

14 Tarkwa              

 

15 Winneba  

 

FIBRE OPTIC METRO AREA NETWORK (MAN)

 

The Ministries area of Accra is already served by several miles of fibre optic cable networks which will be fully leveraged to deliver a state-of-the-art converged high speed metropolitan area network, connecting virtually all the ministries and several key departments and agencies. The existing fibre optic resources will be terminated with new Huawei equipment that will implement a highly resilient ring based network topology that will run at a 10 Gigabit speeds as shown below

           The figure above shows the Logical layout of the Optical Fibre Metro Area Network.