NITA increases bandwidth to improve efficiency

The National Information Technology Agency (NITA) has increased its bandwidth by about 700 percent.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The move is to enhance its operation and provide better services to state and private institutions. NITA is the agency responsible for implementing Ghana’s IT policies. It provides the platform to host the websites of all state institutions.

The Agency has been accused of providing substandard services as many state institutions struggle to control huge traffic that visits their websites. Recently, the rector of the Ghana Institute of Journalism, Wilberforce Dzisah intimated that, the school had to postpone its graduation date due to challenges it faced in computing the grades of students. He blamed the NITA for the mishap.

The Ministry of Education also blamed NITA for the challenges that characterized the SHS placement system as the website facilitating the process was slow.

The agency at the beginning of this year was providing its services on a 1.6 Gigabyte Bandwidth but has increased it to 20 gigabyte.

The Director General of NITA, Jeff Konadu Addo, told Starr Business’ Osei Owusu Amankwaah the move will help address laxities in its operation.

“When we came in the entire government internet bandwidth capacity that was being powered by NITA for the entire country was just 1.6 gig; obviously it will be slow, when you look at the scope of NITA’s network,” he noted.

“We looked at it and we said, No, so we had to go back to the ministry and make a case, argue and the minister gracefully saw the wisdom in it and agreed that, Yes, we need to engage other service providers to give us more capacity.”

“Today we have a capacity of up to 20 gig, back to back, where we are powering more capacity to the MDAs. We are working on it now and very soon state agencies will see a whole different service that is being provided,” Mr. Addo said.