‘Reduce cost of providing internet facilities’

Page 43: October 16, 2008.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE Ministry of Communications has appealed to Internet service providers (ISPs) to reduce the cost of accessing Internet facilities to help increase the level of Internet penetration in the country.
An Assistant Director in charge of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) at the ministry, Mr Kofi Benning, made the call at the launch of two products by iBurst Africa, an ISP, in Accra last Thursday.
The products, iSpeed and iShield, are designed to provide connectivity and mechanisms to prevent unauthorised access to certain sites and pages on the world-wide web.
He said the level of Internet penetration was still very low in Ghana, which was attributable to the high cost of accessing Internet usage.
He said it was estimated that between 1.5 million and two million Ghanaians had access to the Internet, although the number of ISPs had grown to nearly 20 firms.
Mr Benning commended iBurst Africa for its impact on the Ghanaian scene since it was launched in March this year.
The Product Manager of iShield, Mr Ken Gilford, said the product sought to put the controlling power of the Internet in the hands of the user.
“iShield is a complete Internet management tool which, combined with a stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall, enables the user to put in place mechanisms to prevent unauthorised access to certain sites and pages on the world- wide web,” he noted.
“iShield incorporates an e-mail server so that internal e-mail can stay internal to the company and does not need to be transmitted across the Internet and then downloaded again,” he added.
Mr Gilford explained that the product offered usage reports, as it displayed Internet usage per user, web sites visited, incoming and outgoing e-mails and online chats, stressing that “reports can be generated to show usage for selected periods and automatically lists highest users”.
For his part, the Head of Sales of iBurst Africa, Mr Maurice Gil, said iSpeed was a corporate product that provided connectivity and control for the end user by providing a bundled firewall solution.