Financial Times

SLT broadband network connects schools islandwide
Sri Lanka Telecom is to provide broadband Internet access, initially to 1100 schools across the island under an agreement signed with the Secondary Education Modernization Project (SEMP), an ADB funded project of the Ministry of Education.

The agreement was signed between Shuhei Anan, CEO SLT and Anura Dissanayake, Director SEMP/Ministry of Education. Mr. Anan said that since education is of extreme importance to the country’s next generation, SLT’s partnership will bring the necessary facilities to improve and enhance the methods of learning and teaching further. He said that SLT will act as the telecommunications backbone providing high-speed access to data, video, and voice communications in schools and libraries that are working in collaboration with SEMP.

Kapila Chandrasena, Chief Marketing Officer, SLT said that it is a vision of the company to enhance the educational opportunities anytime, anywhere where students and the teachers can share their most expensive and valuable asset beyond the school environment, thus extending opportunities for a wider educational scope. “We intend coming up with a solution for any requirement and together with my team, and the support of our vendors, we shall be able to provide learning enhancement in existing classrooms through increased student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction,” he said.

SLT will provide state-of-the-art technology to improve the quality, reliability, usability and access to a truly high-speed information artery providing direct links to the schools, particularly those in rural areas across the island.
According to Mr. Dissanayake, the first goal of the project is to upgrade the quality of mathematics and science subjects for students studying towards their O/Levels. The second goal is to provide Internet connections for principles and teachers in these schools to access teacher training and course materials.

The Ministry of Education is to set up a National Operations Centre (NCO) at the Moratuwa University to control and monitor the activities of schools islandwide. Each of the 1100 will get a minimum of 128 kbps Internet access over SLT IP VPN and the NOC located at the Moratuwa University will be connected with STM-1 (155 mbps) for higher speed internet connectivity. Students can then access online the subjects relevant to the school syllabus which will be hosted at the NOC e-library.

The SEMP project has significantly helped students who are performing below national averages in these major subject areas. With SLT’s commitment to provide broadband Internet access, this facility will be further enhanced.
“Two million children will have access to databases and we are proud to be a partner with SLT which is known for reliability and trustworthiness,” said Mr. Dissanayake.

By the end of this year, SLT hopes to expand the CDMA network island wide and provide Wimax, which is an emerging technology using radio frequencies to give broadband wireless access to the customers. This project will deliver a set of pathways for poor, rural high school students to close the performance gap between themselves and those in the bigger urban towns. SEMP hopes to increase the number of schools to 5000, which is 60 percent of the student population by 2010.

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