Providing the national backbone transmission services to support this NGN will be South Africa’s second national telecommunications operator, Neotel.
The project has adopted a greenfields approach. The new network will be developed in tandem with the existing network, and transition to the NGN should be fully implemented by October.
The NGN will replace the current government common core network (GCCN), because, in the four years since its deployment, core capacity requirements on the GCCN have grown by 150% year-on-year, although there have been no major bandwidth upgrades until now.
The project’s total investment is R454-mil-lion over a five-year period, and is the largest deployment of NGN services in the public sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sita’s deal with Neotel is worth R378-million over five years.
“In using Neotel, Sita is ensuring that cheaper telecommunications for government can become a reality. “I believe this deal is Neotel’s biggest to date, which, I’m sure, will provide an important impetus for enhanced competition and growth of the domestic telecommunications market and, in turn, the economy,” emphasises Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi.
She also notes that this ‘bandwidth-on-demand’ from Neotel came at a cost about 8,5 times cheaper than the closest bid, demon- strating the importance of effective competition in the marketplace, and reducing the cost of doing business in South Africa.
Neotel’s high-capacity links will connect Sita’s key sites in major cities and towns across South Africa with almost 700 Mb/s of transmission bandwidth.
In addition to this, the overall investment also includes an upgrade of the existing GCCN backbone from Nortel to Cisco Technology. The upgrade will be undertaken by Business Connexion. Business Connexion will supply, install and support the network equipment on the NGN for three years. This upgrade is worth more than R76-mil-lion, excluding maintenance, which Business Connexion will also be undertaking.
The NGN will be implemented in parallel with the existing GCCN and switched on when ready, thus eliminating changeover hiccups. In september 2006, a successful proof of concept was conducted at the Cisco laboratory in San Jose, in the US, to simulate the NGN.
Sita currently provides data services to government on the GCCN, connecting about 3 000 offices across the country. This infrastructure was built to support a diverse range of services, such as voice, video, data and multimedia, but requires further investment to upgrade the network to provide these value-added services.
Sita maintains that this project will give it the capability to provide services in support of its egovernment strategy and deliver a world-class converged communications service to improve citizen service delivery.
In response to a question on extending services to rural areas, Sita business operations chief and executive director Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo says that it is imperative that connectivity reaches underserviced areas. “The enhanced GCCN will allow government departments to better serve the public. We also believe that as more local government departments are integrated on to the network, citizens in rural areas will benefit from improved service delivery and access to local government systems. “Neotel has extensive experience in linking rural communities in India, which could be of benefit to Sita in future,” says Isaacs-Mpulo.
“The NGN will create a platform for more advanced services that will lead to improved stability, reachability and capacity that can provide government departments with faster and more efficient network service, fourth- generation services with advanced data, voice and video solutions, a wider range of network services, and the ability to connect various transmission technologies, such as metro Ethernets, ADSL and WiMax,” concludes Fraser-Moleketi.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Christy van der Merwe
Quelle/Source: Engineering News, 08.06.2007
