Accra, Jan. 25, GNA - Work on the 30 million-dollar E-governance backbone Project is expected to begin soon, Mr Gideon Quarcoo, Deputy Minister of Communication said on Monday.

The Management of China-based HUAWEI Telecom was awarded the contract to undertake government’s e-governance project in April 2006 to provide centralized information technology and e-services to Ministries, Departments and Agencies as well as metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies.

The contract was renewed in 2008 and the first batch of materials is expected in April, 2010 for site construction work to begin in May.

The project is expected to end in December 2010.

Mr Quarcoo said at a meeting with the experts on the project in Accra. He asked the team of information technology experts from HUAWEI Telecom and the National Information Technology Authority to solicit views from other sources for an efficient and effective implementation of the project. Mr Quarcoo urged the team to ensure the project covered the entire country.

Mr Jackie Shen, Product Manager of HUAWEI, said it would be difficult to connect the entire country because most areas had no access to fibre, micro wave and connectivity. He explained that when the project was initiated in 2006, there were 138 metropolitan, municipal and districts but had been increased to 170.

He said Wa and Bolgatanga might not be connected because there was no fibre, however, by August 2010 Visat would be connected to these areas in the absence of the fibre.

GNA

Huawei, a leader in providing next-generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, has announced that its UMTS900 solution has been successfully deployed in the MTN Ghana network. This represents the first time in Africa continent that UMTS has been successfully conducted for voice, video and data in the 900 MHz frequency band.

The network are based on Huawei’s 4th-generation 3900-Series Node B, which combines advanced technology with high efficiency to boost operators’ productivity. The system supports a bandwidth of just 4.2 MHz to provide UMTS service while working seamlessly with the existing GSM network.

Together with HUAWEI, MTN intends to utilize this technology as a means of extending its 3.5G network to more rural communities to enable the people to truly enjoy the benefits of a high-speed network wherever you go, said Eben Albertyn, CTO MTN Ghana. Huawei is the industry leader in 900 MHz re-farming with more than 50% of current market share in the field.

In a related development The MTN Group has confirmed that the Head office of the West and Central Africa (WECA) region would to be located in Ghana, a statement in Accra said on Monday. The WECA regional office comprises of nine operating units - Nigeria, Benin, Cote D’Ivoire Liberia, Cameroon, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Congo Brazzaville and Ghana.

Ms. Mawuena Adjo Dumor, Corporate Service Executive of MTN Ghana, in a statement noted that Ghana was chosen because of its friendly business environment among other things. She said the headquarters would be the administrative hub of the nine countries that constituted the WECA region. “The establishment of the Ghana office provides enormous benefits not only to our business but to the country and we are excited to be hosting it” she said.

She said the benefits include leveraging economies of scale in respect of supply of telecoms infrastructure across the region, which will have positive implications for the national agenda to make Ghana the gateway to West Africa.

Ms. Dumor said it would also create opportunities to apply Ghanaian knowledge, expertise and experience to other MTN operating units’ technical and stakeholder engagement initiatives. Ghana has been recognized at the MTN Group level for execution excellence in Marketing and Social Responsibility. “Indeed the Ghana operating unit continues to support knowledge sharing in these key areas of the business,”Ms Dumor said.

There are currently three Regional Offices within the MTN Group - the South East Africa (SEA) regional office; the WECA regional office and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional office.

The MTN Group recorded 108 million subscribers at the close of September 30, 2009, out of which the WECA region made a very significant contribution. In Ghana MTN is the market leader, commanding some eight million out of the close to 15 million mobile phone subscribers in the country, representing over 54 per cent market share. The MTN Group is a global sponsor of the 2010 FIFA World Cup slated for June in South Africa.

Source: Ghanaian Chronicle