The launch of Sri Lanka Telecom’s much-talked of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), due this month, has been delayed due to certain operational problems and would be ready by the end of the year, official sources said. SLT CEO Pat Abeysekera told The Sunday Times FT that the date of official launching of the new service had not been finalised although it was announced at the IPTV exhibition at the BMICH recently that the service would commence in August. The delay was due to some infrastructure issues and the service would be ready by the end of 2008, she said without giving details.

The product was to be launched by SLT Visioncom, a fully owned subsidiary of SLT. The company had operated the IPTV service as a pilot project among 100 customers and found that some channels are not working properly. SLT engineers are now in the process of rectifying the defect. These engineers also said that broadband Internet is the critical factor in implementing this initiative and that SLT needs to upgrade its ADSL system to ADSL 2+, which the compamy doesn’t have at the moment.

SLT officials said the company plans to use the Rolling Stream platform for the IPTV service. SLT Visioncom is to invest Rs.100 million on this product. SLT's IPTV deployment is designed to support around 100,000 subscribers in the first two years.