The appropriate infrastructure needs to be in place to enable the strategy to proceed. Citizens will not fully realise the benefits of e-commerce until they can easily and securely authenticate themselves over the Internet. In addition, they must be confident that data will remain confidential. Many commercial e-commerce applications do not require identification. The web-based bookshop, does not care who you are as long as you have a valid credit card.
Banking relies on password protection, which is less than optimal.
There are companies that offer the technology but take up and use of this technology is a legitimate role for the Council through the Promoting Electronic Government group. The Newham Community Card is one way to achieve this and potentially attract sponsorship. The communications network infrastructure is vital to the smooth running of council business. In order to enable the network to cope with these challenges, a major re-engineering of the core infrastructure is being planned for implementation during the course of this year. This includes, for example, for the Schools Network a very cheap form of broadband technology - xDSL that enables broadband connection of their entire local network to the Internet at a tenth of the price per annum of that which would normally apply.