Financial Times

SLT customers express disappointment over speed

By Akhry Ameer

Customers to Sri Lanka Telecom's (SLT) newly commissioned ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband Internet service claimed they have been misled by the telecom operator for speed. Many customers are discovering that the service offers less than 20% of the advertised speed and say they have been misled by SLT ADSL advertisements.

Though ADSL is a contended technology meaning that the advertised speeds are not guaranteed, many of the similar service providers overseas in the like of British Telecom offer contention ratios between 50:1 and 20:1. The contention ratio is the number of users (at the exchange) with others the promised bandwidth would be shared. SLT ADSL users say they have been able to only obtain between 30 kbps (kilobytes per second) and 50 kbps most of the time, whereas the connection is for 256 kbps. SLT's advertisement have been using the words 'broadband access' and it offers 'speeds 30 times

faster than dial-up' clearly indicating it is faster. Some of the users who have tested the access speeds of SLT have found it to be ranging between 10ms (milliseconds) and 20ms, whereas internationally similar service providers average an access speed of 0.3ms.

Users of the superior ADSL Office package have also complained that the speed experienced by them is not different from home users though they are paying a higher price.

Further, ADSL users are claiming to be misled through these advertisements as it doesn't talk about taxes. An ADSL home user (Express Package) seeking to subscribe at the advertised rate of Rs. 2,250 would in effect be paying Rs. 2,700 with taxes.

Users who have written to SLT have not even received acknowledgements of their complaints. One particular user who complained to the Telecom Regulatory Commission (TRC) was overjoyed by the TRC's handling of the complaint.

The TRC had acknowledged receipt of the complaint within three days and thereafter extended ample time for an interview.

The TRC is now awaiting a response from SLT on the complaint.
An SLT official, contacted by The Sunday Times FT, acknowledged that the ADSL speed is around 50kbps. Mr. Priyantha Undugodage, Head of IT and Broadband Services, said it was because the users are accessing international websites, due to a lack of local sites. Accessing international sites involves the connections crossing over various Internet backbones whose speeds cannot be guaranteed by SLT.

Responding to queries that the bandwidth of ADSL customers has been restricted, he said it was because SLT cannot afford to purchase higher bandwidth in the main Internet backbone. He said in order to offer higher bandwidth the subscription charges would have to be increased.

ADSL customers, on the other hand, maintain the view that if these were problems envisaged by SLT, the company should have advertised true access speeds allowing the consumer to make the decision without bloating the speed to attract customers through devious means.