NEW DELHI: Cisco Systems, a company dealing in networking, has announced the
setting up of a Wide Area Network (WAN) in Gujarat for its e-governance
initiative. As per the mandate, the WAN connects the State Headquarters with all
the 25 district headquarters and 225 taluka's across the State. This is one of
the first and only IP end-to-end e-governance network of its kind in India,
which would carry Voice, Video and Data on a single converged network based on
Cisco's AVVID architecture.
This is an end-to-end IP network, which carries data, phone calls as well as
videoconferences on the same converged infrastructure. The network will be used
for communicating 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 WAN 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 have been used.
"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", said 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 and expansion"
flexibility, both in horizontal and longitudinal direction and perhaps will
keeping the "technology obsolescence" away for quite some time, said
Dave.