SLT says it now provides island-wide telephone and network coverage
Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the national telephone service provider which started its ‘i-Sri Lanka’ project in 2011,says it has covered every nook and corner of the country in providing telephone and network coverage. The closing ceremony of the project will be officially held tomorrow (28 March) at the Waters Edge in Colombo, as stated at a media briefing held at the SLT headquarters in Colombo on Wednesday.
Briefing journalists, SLT Chief Network Officer Priyantha Fernandez said that before the ‘i-Sri Lanka’ project was introduced,Internet penetration was very low in the country with a speed of only 512 Kilobytes per second(Kbps). For fixed line connections under the project, copper cables were initially introduced to increase the speed up to 20 Megbytes per second(Mbps) which today has increased up to 100 Mbps by connecting fiber optic cables called the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). Also with the VDSL technology, by connecting to the copper cables, the speed was increased up to 50 Mbps before FTTH was introduced, he added.
Mr. Fernandez said, “Since the ‘i-Sri Lanka’ project was implemented in the country, Internet penetration has increased by 2.5 times around the nation. Every corner in Sri Lanka wherever we had copper cables has been upgraded to fiber optic cables to provide 100 Mbps Internet speed. Nearly 500 base stations are established for SLT wireless connections at the moment and we are planning to increase it up to 2500.” When the fixed broadband connectivityincreases by 10 per cent in a country, there will be an increase of 1.5 per cent GDP, he noted.
He also mentioned that the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-5 (SEA-ME-WE-5) submarine cable system that was launched recently will be completed by the end of this year. Eighteen countries will be connected through this system in which an investment of US$ 600 million was made by all 18 countries while Sri Lanka’s share was $40 million. With the SEA-ME-WE-5 connectivity, the speed of Internet will further increase and will support other mobile service providers to use the underwater cable system, he stated.
In December 2015, SLT completed all phases of the ‘i-Sri Lanka’programme by adding over 4,500 new access nodes across the island with an investment of more than Rs. 13 billion. Further, SLT will be able to provide 1,300,000 more broadband connections at data rates of up to 20 Mbps and will support Sri Lanka’s first FTTH network which is set to deliver data speeds of 100 Mbps. With this, SLT will be able to serve 70,000 households through FTTH by the end of this year.
Also at the media briefing, SLT announced the company’s partnership with the government’s ‘VirusaraVaraprasada’ initiative that seeks to pay tribute to war heroes and their families.It is a privilege card introduced by the Ministry of Defence to expand the welfare benefits offered to disabled or retired officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Police and Civil Defence Forces. This privilege card is also extended to the immediate family members of these officers.
The holders of the card will be eligible to a range of attractive offers from diverse corporations covering all of their day to day needs such as medical care and treatment, transportation, banking and finance facilities, telecommunications and ICT as well as provide easy access to a range of other products and services. Virusara Privilege customers are entitled to benefits such as megaline new connection, package upgrades, special PEO TV package, citylink CDMA and Sisu connect. The offer will commence from April 4.