Comm. Minister inspects Data Centre project

The minister made the call when he paid a familiarisation tour of the project site.

The GH¢35 million project is to allow electronic storage of data of all government agencies.

The infrastructure is to serve as back-up for the storage of data and preservation of official documents—both local and foreign.

The structure has seven floors—three will serve as data floors and four as offices for the ministry.

Dr Omane-Boamah said “the project is very dear to the heart of the government because of the value it will add to government business as far as the storage of data is concerned.”

He complained about the huge sums of money paid to Vodafone Ghana for providing broadband services to government.

Vodafone is said to charge GH¢2 million every year for providing broadband service to the government.

The Communications Minister said the ministry would engage the management of Vodafone in discussions on the charges to ascertain possible tradeoff areas to reduce cost.

“We are undertaking the Eastern Corridor Fibre Optic project which runs from Ho to the north and when completed we will offer Vodafone the opportunity to reach areas they are not strong in,” he said.

He said the ministry was also upgrading 30 Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) sites to LTE while adding new 30 LTE sites to bring the number to 60.

WIMaX is a wireless communications standard designed to provide up to one Gbit/s for fixed stations while Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a mobile network technology that is being deployed by mobile operators on both the GSM and the CDMA technology paths and it is many times faster than the WiMAX. 

Dr Omane-Boamah expressed the hope that the completion of the project would enhance the performance of government institutions.

At the Kofi Annan ICT Centre, he pledged the commitment of the ministry to support its activities.

Story by Charles Benoni Okine