NITA Director-General calls for promotion of .gh domain
The Director-General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) Mr George Atta-Boateng has called for the promotion of the domain name .gh in Ghana to accelerate the development of the nation’s emerging ICT landscape.
He said the .gh domain name is a source of national pride and identity and therefore corporate entities and individuals must patronise it.
The domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the internet.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, Mr Atta-Boateng said the domain name system had come to stay: “You cannot do business on the internet without a website and you can’t have a website without the domain name, so fortunately for us we have the .com.gh which is being hosted by NITA, Ghana’s own”.
“For commercial purposes in Ghana you need an identity on the internet, every country has an internet extension or a domain name extension, so the .gh has come to stay and NITA is promoting its usage,” he added.
He said with the completion and automation of the .gh registry, there is the need to create a vibrant domain name business ecosystem that would make the .gh domain name a preferred choice.
The Director-General said NITA’s principal objective is to ensure the systematic adoption of ICT technologies in Ghana.
He said in line with this objective, NITA has developed an extensive 4G and fibre optics access infrastructure and National Data centre where both government and private sector could collocate and purchase data centre services.
Mr Atta-Boateng said NITA is looking for private sector partners to make both access and data centre services available to private sector for use in their ICT development.
He noted that the National Data centre currently hosts the Ghana Internet Exchange Point (GIXP), the Ghanaian Academic and Research Network (GARNET) exchange switch and the .GHccTLD servers and is gradually becoming the Accra Internet Hub.
He said a root server project is in the offing and would also be sited at the National Datacentre, and “when completed, Ghana will see reasonable increase in internet speeds when accessing information”.
Source: GNA