Govt mulls selling excess e-governance bandwidth

By Danielle Campbell-Lowe –

Government is examining the prospects of wholesaling excess bandwidth from the e-governance project to large firms and organisations.
This is according to the project’s unit head, Alexei Ramotar, as he revealed that there will be excess bandwidth that can be used up for other purposes. Ramotar was at the time speaking at a press conference held at the Office of the President in the presence of the project’s deputy head, Anil Singh and Haiwei’s Project Control officer Roscoe Green.
He noted that although there is a structure that would allow government to sell bandwidth to private individuals needing to access the facility, government has no intentions of retailing bandwidth. However, there is a commercial component and a likelihood that bandwidth can be sold to large corporations.

Timeline
According to Ramotar, the project was initially scheduled to be finished in June. However, owing to a delay in the project design, the unanticipated need for piles that had to be procured after soil testing and other issues, the deadline was further pushed to September.
Ramotar said with the completion of field testing, the entire project would be finished in December.
“The entire project is US$32 million. It is a fixed-cost budget and we are not exceeding those costs,” Ramotar said.
The project will mean the Guyana Police Force has ready access to information and there is also talk of implementing the U.S.-inspired dashboard webcam for police. The e-governance project unit has already engaged the police and the various ministries in an attempt to estimate the quantity of bandwidth they will need.
The system would utilise cloud-based computing so that government agencies would not have to spend money on hardware infrastructure for connectivity and could instead focus on providing service as the applications come on stream.
Data centre
The E-Governance Data Centre is being facilitated at Castellani House, where some of the support systems are housed.
“The police, being security conscious, would want to have theirs hosted elsewhere, but we are providing the connectivity so that the high-speed data, video, etc can pass through their system. So they would require very limited access, so we would see data packages go through the system without having access to it or without knowing the contents,” Ramotar pointed out.
He explained that the system employed is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) where the end network systems of agencies can use their own security encryption on their specific data packages, although data goes through a central route.
As far as the project is concerned, the unit is moving ahead with building towers at 12 sites for the LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network. It has also started rolling out cable around Georgetown that would connect the major ministries and government industries and would extend to UG Turkeyen and locations along the coast.
The Information Communication Technology (ICT) project was envisaged as one to build the ICT infrastructure in Guyana.
Many companies now require strong information systems to help them with planning and decision-making; therefore, very strong infrastructure is needed. Government’s intention is to follow the example of countries like Rwanda and Australia.