How GTN started [Government Telecommunication Network]

The Government Telecommunications Network Long Distance service (GTN LD) was a private network operated for government departments and agencies. It was managed by the Government Centre for Information Systems (CCTA) on behalf of central government. The service was a basic long distance voice service offering on-net and off-net calls. Basic point to point dial up video conferencing and mobile services were also available on GTN (LD). The service was provided by government for government and the key benefit of GTN was that it was cheaper than PSTN offerings. The CCTA were able to use the buying power of the government community to achieve economies of scale. Research showed that although being the cheapest offering available, the GTN was heavily congested, lead times for new connections were slow, account management was poor due to a lack of resources, fault reporting was badly dealt with because the site connections was basically an overall private network and the bill presented to each department was not broken down in any way. As a result of the “Competing for Quality” policy, the CCTA assessed its activities and concluded that the GTN long distance services should be outsourced