Keynote address by Ms Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Minister for the Public Service and Administration, State Information Technology Agency (SITA) media conference

Good morning everyone

It is indeed an honour and great pleasure for me to announce, on behalf of SITA, a very significant project to implement a Next Generation Network (NGN) that will replace the current Government Common Core Network (GCCN).

The project's total investment is worth R454 million over five years and it represents the largest deployment of NGN services in sub-Saharan Africa for the public sector.

The investment entails an upgrade of the GCCN backbone from Nortel to Cisco technology by Business Connexion. Business Connexion will supply, install and support the network equipment on the NGN for three years. The upgrade is worth in excess of R76 million, excluding maintenance.

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

Neotel's high capacity links will connect SITA's key sites in major cities and towns across South Africa with nearly 700 Megabit per second of transmission bandwidth. This is nearly twice the bandwidth SITA has procured in the past. This investment is worth R378 million, over five years.

NGN symbolises a quantum leap forward from 2002 when SITA successfully implemented a single network system, namely the GCCN, which at the time offered enormous benefits with respect to enhancing network reliability, functionality and performance.

In deploying the GCCN, SITA could support virtual private networks for various government departments and ensure that its mandate, which is to reduce duplication, facilitate interoperability of systems and improve cost performance, were realised. The GCCN also offered improved throughput and scalability.

It may now seem like a lifetime away, but prior to the GCCN, a total of 16 different networks were in existence within government with none of them interoperating due to closed standards. GCCN addressed this as a single, physical and fully redundant wide area network infrastructure that served the whole of government.

In the four years since its deployment, core capacity requirements on the GCCN have grown by 150% year on year, but there have been no major bandwidth upgrades, until now.

I am sure it will not surprise anyone here that I am not an expert on the subject of Next Generation Networks. Nevertheless, it is important to elaborate on what it is and what our expectations are.

NGN, as the name implies, is a broad term to describe the future state of infrastructure for telecommunications and information services.

So, why NGN for government?

SITA has, for a couple of years now, actively pursued a strategy to provide NGN services to render more cost effective and improved services to the government departments it serves.

SITA currently provides data services to government departments on the GCCN. While this infrastructure was built to support a diverse range of services such as voice, video, data and multi-media, it requires further investment to upgrade the network to provide these value added services.

At the time of the GCCN's implementation, the architecture and design was adequate to deliver the required services. As higher and newer services were deployed on the GCCN, it became evident that an upgrade was required owing to ever increasing user demands for more advanced services.

Furthermore, additional capacity is required to create more virtual private networks, cater for additional ports to connect government departments and provide broadband solutions.

The Next Generation Network will create the 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
* the ability to connect various transmission technologies such as metro Ethernets, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) and Wi-Max.

SITA's vision is to deliver a world class converged communications service to government to improve service delivery. This project will give us the capability to provide services in support of our e-Government strategy.

Furthermore, it will enable us to improve our citizens' experience through initiatives such as:

* e-Education through the Further Education Training (FET) colleges Virtual Private Network Project
* telemedicine through the e-Health projects with access to clinics, etc
* connectivity to Multi-Purpose Community centres
* creating a stable communications platform for all departments to utilise in the execution of their citizen-centric operations
* strengthening collaboration between various tiers of government.

Central to NGN service deployment is the convergence of applications, services and networks. With NGN, it may therefore seem that we are moving into unfamiliar territory.

With NGN, SITA is in every sense transcending the world of traditional telecommunications. But we are confident that SITA has the right partners on board to ensure that during this transitional phase we straddle both old and new worlds of telecommunications with confidence.

Among the partners and technology vendors, many of whom have representatives here today, are, as mentioned earlier, Neotel, Business Connexion and Cisco.

In utilising Neotel, SITA is ensuring that cheaper telecommunications for government can become a reality. I believe this deal is also Neotel's biggest to date, which I am sure will provide an important impetus for enhanced competition and growth of the domestic telecommunications market, and in turn the economy.

As a new player in the South African telecommunications space, Neotel is able to bring to the market the latest technology and greater flexibility. This means that SITA, on behalf of government, can access additional capacity as and when it is required at a significantly reduced cost. This "bandwidth on demand" from Neotel translates to a cost of some 8,5 times less than the next closest offer. This demonstrates the importance of effective competition in the marketplace, which in turn reduces the cost of doing business in South Africa.

Deploying NGN services and enhancing the transmission capacity of the GCCN augurs well for improved government service delivery as we gear up for 2010. In addition, the multi-billion rand Integrated Financial Management System will utilise the enhanced capacity of the core network. With this investment, it further entrenches SITA as the preferred service provider of communications services to government.

In conclusion, moving toward a Next Generation Network speaks directly to SITA's mandate and the Information Technology house of values philosophy. Through the deployment of NGN services, SITA is meeting each pillar of its value proposition, which is to:

* leverage economies of scale
* enhance interoperability
* ensure systems security
* eliminate duplication
* foster black economic empowerment.

This project bears testimony to SITA's commitment as the key information technology agency for the state, to consistently explore innovative ways of leveraging information technology for efficient and cost-effective solutions to accelerate service delivery in government departments.

Thank you.

Issued by: Department of Public Service and Administration
23 May 2007