Alcatel-Lucent extends Ghana's e-government services to rural regions

Fresh fiber-optic network and task management service for Ghana's National Information Technology Agency to bring a variety of online services to government offices in distant areas of the state.

Alcatel-Lucent (Euro next Paris and NYSE: ALU) & NITA - the information and communications technology (ICT) policy arm of Ghana€™s Ministry of Communications are to radically get bigger contact links between central & local administration offices in support of 'e-Ghana, a national plan to develop local IT services & get better the transparency & effectiveness of government functions.

Alcatel-Lucent will design & apply a 600km fiber-optic ‘backbone€™ network that will give high-speed data links among central government functions & remote and rural locations. In adding, Alcatel-Lucent will offer a national data center facility to support the network, through close collaboration with HP, a worldwide grouping partner for the delivery of converged ICT solutions.

Under the contract with NITA (National Information Technology Agency), Alcatel-Lucent will also control network operations of Ghana's whole 'e-government' plan for three years beginning November 2012. Financing for the plan is being facilitated by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), an office of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs tasked with hostility scarcity through the advertising of human rights & economic enlargement.

The network will simply be bright to increase to support predictable increases in future demand: the government intends to expand use of e-services to the health, education, justice, immigration, parliament & other sectors over the next a small number of years.