Wide Area Network to support the State's e-governance initiative
AHMEDABAD, India - February 25, 2002 - A massive e-government initiative is in progress with Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking, providing equipment to set up a Wide Area Network (WAN) in Gujarat for its e-governance initiative. This statewide network infrastructure will leverage to change the way services are delivered to citizens, businesses, and city government employees
As per the mandate the WAN would connect the State Headquarters with all the 25 district headquarters and 225 Talukh's across the State. This is an IP e-governance network, which carries Voice, Video and Data on a single converged network based on Cisco's AVVID architecture. This network, in turn would be connected to the Gandhinagar Sachivalaya Campus Area Network (SCAN), which is also based on award-winning Cisco LAN switches, using Gigabit Ethernet technology.
Our goal is to provide a speedy and transparent governance system capable of providing better services to the common citizens of the State. Reliability becomes of paramount importance in any public delivery system that is why we have chosen Cisco at the wide area network backbone, said Mr. J S Rana, IAS, Principal Secretary (IT) with the Government of Gujarat.
"Gujarat understands both, long and short term impact of Information Technology (IT) and the total architecture for e-enabling of administration has been worked out accordingly, says Mr. R. K. Dave, OSD (IT) with the Govt. of Gujarat and Engineer_in_charge of GSWAN project. Gujarat is the first state to have IP based, AVVID architecture, Wide Area Network (WAN) supporting voice, video and data. The physical extent of WAN coverage is the smallest administrative unit upto Taluka head quarter (225 Talukas in the state). IP based system architecture is helping us - by offering "low cost integration & expansion" flexibility, both in horizontal and longitudinal direction and perhaps will keep the "technology obsolescence" away for quite some time, said Mr. Dave.
"The mandate to set up Gujarat's wide area network (WAN) is a special win for Cisco Systems in India. This is an end-to-end IP network for a government in India to support its e-governance initiative. The network will be based on a 3 tier architecture with the highest levels of resilience and redundancy built into it to support its mission critical nature," said Naresh Wadhwa, VP, Cisco Systems India.
The network will carry data, phone calls as well as videoconferences on the same converged infrastructure and will be used for communications between the Chief Minister, Government bureaucrats and other Government departments. The network's potential will also be harnessed by putting it into use for broader range of applications including social usage such as e learning, information kiosks amongst others.
The multi-service wide area network comprises Cisco's 7500 series of high-performance routers that forms the core, Cisco 3600 routers for aggregation at the District level, and Cisco 1750 routers at the Taluka level of the network. In the campus network, Cisco's 3500, 4000 and 6500 series LAN switches are used.
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