The Government Backbone Network (GNET) is a government-wide network infrastructure that provides stable, reliable and high resilience broadband network connections to government bureaux, departments, as well as the common services. Besides communicating with other GNET clients through his/her own GNET connections, a GNET client can also access the outside world through the Central Internet Gateway (CIG) common services.

The GNET core comprises networking equipment such as routers and switches that located in our three data centres at Wanchai Tower, Tsuen Wan Government Offices and Sai Kung Government Offices.

Since early 1995, we have been working with the Architectural Services Department and the Government Property Agency to install backbone networks in government offices buildings. The main objective is to construct a data communication infrastructure within a building to connect the tenants with other networks outside the building for the purposes of sharing of information and for communication. The data communication infrastructure is composed of two major parts: the vertical fibre cabling system and the network equipment. Government offices with a building backbone network installed are considered as GNET Points of Presence.

Building backbone networks have been installed in new government offices buildings, namely the North Point Government Offices, Cheung Sha Wan Government Offices and Shatin Government Offices in 1998, 1999 and 2002 respectively.

Existing government offices buildings, such as Murray Building and Central Government Offices building, had the building backbone network installed during major renovation in 1997 and 2002 respectively.

A networking system was also implemented to link up the WanChai Tower, the Immigration Tower and the Revenue Tower with optical fibre in 1998. This network system is referred to as the Three-Tower Network System. The Three-Tower Network provides tenants in these three buildings with networking services similar to those of a building backbone network.

With the availability of many common services offered via GNET, there is an increasing demand from the bureaux and departments to scale up their connection speeds. They can deploy Metro Ethernet for setting up cost effective high-speed connections to GNET if they are not co-located with GNET Points of Presence. It is anticipated that, with the rollout of e-government applications, more and more bureaux and departments will upgrade their connection speed.

Since the existing GNET equipment becomes aging and we plan to bring in new functionalities such as IPv6, traffic engineering and application-aware VPN services, we have planned a renovation of the existing GNET. The implementation is in progress and we expect the new GNET will be in full production in 2008.