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In order to provide meaningful access to justice, the Legal Aid Board has to pursue a high degree of organisational sustainability and efficiency across a wide geographical area. Telkom provides the answer to cost-effective, robust, future-proof converged wide-area network, the flagship VPN Supreme.

Capacity for justice

 The Legal Aid Board (LAB) is an independent statutory body. Its purpose is to provide legal aid and representation to indigent people, at the state’s expense. Established by the Legal Aid Act in 1969, LAB also gives institutional expression to the latter-day constitutional right of ‘access to justice’.

Envisioning a country in which citizens’ constitutional rights are ultimately protected and defended, LAB sets itself the following mission: “To be a leading provider of quality, professional legal services, ensuring effective access to justice for the poor and vulnerable in an independent and caring manner.”

To ensure it is able to fulfil this mission, the board pursues a high degree of organisational sustainability and efficiency. “That implies taking care of organisational capacity, which includes a stable and available information and communications technology platform, effectively connecting and serving our nationwide coverage area,” says Obert Masango, information systems executive at LAB.

LAB provides its services in face-to- face consultation with applicants. Headquartered in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, it has six regional offices, 59 Justice Centres and 49 satellite offices around the country. The 108 Justice Centres and satellite offices provide actual delivery of legal services, while the national and regional offices provide administrative oversight.

What was

Masango says up to the point of Telkom’s involvement, LAB’s communications infrastructure comprised point-to-point leased-line services between all its offices, ranging from 64kbps in capacity (regional and satellite offices and Justice Centres) to 2Mbps (head office). The contract – with Telkom – did not include quality-of-service assurance, service level agreements or network management. He says, in practise, this meant faulty data circuits had to be identified and repaired using in-house resources, without the luxury of guaranteed performance or turnaround times.

“Telkom’s response to this problem was key to their winning the deal,” he adds. “They made a compelling case for remote, centralised, proactive wide area network monitoring, to spot, for instance, over-utilisation of circuits and the need to provision more bandwidth.”

The answer to all problems

John Croone, Telkom corporate account specialist, Government Sales, adds that the existing network was based on Frame Relay, and not the modern Internet Protocol, which has a host of advantages in a twenty-first century deployment, beyond remote monitoring, diagnostics, healing and capacity provisioning. Key among these is quality of service (QOS). “IP is the required technology to guarantee QOS, based on prioritisation of critical application classes over others.” Croone explains that a distributed enterprise such as LAB may have most use for ordinary productivity apps or collaboration in its day-to-day inter-networking, or a need for highbandwidth inter-branch communication, or remote access to centrally hosted transactional apps. “Whatever the case, the requirement exists with all such entities to prioritise delivery of some application classes over others.”

For all these problems with LAB’s old network, the proposed solution was Telkom’s flagship MPLSbased VPN Supreme. VPN Supreme is a QOS-guaranteed, converged business communications network, deployed across a wide area. Based on the telco’s carrier-grade national IP-based broadband network, it provides a scalable, robust, future-proof enterprise backbone, proactively managed and accompanied by service-level guarantees of support, network performance and reliability. It offers economies of scale, doesn’t require buying private networking equipment and saves on the cost of multi-channel enterprise communications.

In the trenches

No project is ever without its challenges; they’re accepted as part of the territory. The only reason we mention them is that they’re so unpredictable. Which problem should present itself today, and to what degree of messiness – that is the true delight of a project. If one could identify and quantify a project’s challenges beforehand with any degree of certainty, it would be like emigrating to Switzerland - a picture too perfect to require our participation.

Tekom’s VPN implementation went something like that – the only hitch worth mentioning was a need for some trenching to pull in fibre at headquarters, to provision enough bandwidth for a proof-of-concept (POC) implementation, reports Croone. Well, that stuff won’t sell newspapers, but then it will probably have a lot of success selling VPNs.

As could be expected, the delay had a minimal knock-on effect on delivery dates, but within the realm of the acceptable. In the event, the POC at selected sites was completed mid-2008, and the national project signed off a year later.

Other delays resulted from insufficient communications infrastructure at five sites, Croone adds. Workarounds at smaller offices may in future include using cellular broadband infrastructure. Croone explains that Telkom will deploy a temporary VSAT solution while a proof-of-concept cellular deployment is under way. For that, Telkom will use a sister company, FastNet, to supply broadband routers with dual network SIM cards.

Better, faster

As envisaged, the VPN had the effect of speeding up LAB’s application and services, says Masango. “The improvement was great. From IT’s perspective, we now receive far fewer calls regarding performance or line issues. Our users are able to do more across the WAN than before. In addition, more legal aid applications can now be processed.” Telkom provided bandwidth to meet the requirements of the following applications, with different quality of service guarantees for each: e-mail, financial application (Syspro), SAP, file-sharing and e-learning, to name a few.

Future plans

Referring to the abovementioned implementation as Phase 1, the parties are currently exploring an extension, Masango says. “We are looking at voice over IP, as well as extra network redundancy to provide extra robustness to the performance that will be required in that event.”

Network redundancy can take many forms, one of which being inherent to the cloud topology of a VPN. Where one WAN circuit fails, a dual line at main sites will provide the fall-back option. At minor and outlying offices, smaller lines may be backed up by satellite (VSAT), or if less delay is required, wireless. In extremely remote cases, dual-network, wireless-only backup is the order of the day.

C O N T A C T

Obert Masango

I S Executive Legal Aid Board
011 877 2088
079 891 6002
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Nonku Dlamini

Executive: Government Sales Telkom SA Ltd
Tel: 012 680 7172
Fax: 012 680 7415
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.telkom.co.za