NID system’s capacity boosted to handle traffic

By ERIC PIET
The PNG Civil and Identity Registry (CIR) has made efforts to increase the National Identification (NID) system’s capacity to handle its traffic.
This is given the 2.2 million target given for NID registrations this year by National Planning and Monitoring Minister Richard Maru.
An outage on the NID system last week, caused by an overload of registration data from the provinces, was restored soon after.
Acting Registrar-General Noel Mobiha said the system was built to handle two-way data flow, one incoming and another outgoing.
“When we overloaded the system with registrations from the provinces, it could not absorb all the data at once and this has caused a collapse in the system,” he told The National.
“My young and vibrant IT team in the department, in consultation with a few other nationals, worked around the clock to identify the fault and rectify it.”
Mobiha said the analogy was the same as in road traffic, where when there were many vehicles in one lane, traffic would queue up.
The addition of few more lanes would free up traffic.
“To rectify the overloading issue, the team has created two more traffic lanes in our system,” Mobiha said.
“Now we have four lanes – two incoming and two outgoing – which would prevent any future system outage.
“This has really speeded up our registration process.
“Of course, to reach our given target of 2.2 million registrations or go even further than that, we will be adding a few more lanes to handle the whole process.”
Mobiha said they had spare generators in place should any power outage occur.